


Decades

by themantlingdark



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 19:56:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16898937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: please pretend commenting is turned off and please don't repost.





	Decades

1 My City Was Gone

 

The information given to him by the drowning man appears to check out. He'll triple check it, but the film he's seeing at the museum doesn't appear to have been tampered with, and Captain Rogers is either very skilled at lying, or unflinchingly honest.

The soldier sees a man with his face laughing beside the captain.

James Buchanan Barnes.

The years of his life that are missing.

The reason the thoughts in his head are always in English.

He remembers the pain of his first capture and thinks of the scars scattered on his skin that are too precise to be from shrapnel as Zola claimed.

Zola.

Zola is the reason he survived the fall and, by extension, the reason he only has one arm.

The reason he could do the jobs they gave him.

He remembers the jobs, dimly but objectively. Clinically.

But, underlying everything, what he recalls the most clearly is the scent of Rogers' skin. The information etched on a piece of his mind that runs deeper than thought. That wild part of the brain buried at the base of the skull - the brain that still has gills and a tail.

He could smell the man as they fought on the helicarrier, and the familiarity made it hard for him to fight. Easy to surrender - to let himself sink into blackness as Rogers knocked him out in a choke hold.

He knows his handlers lied to him. And lies are willful inaccuracies. Worse than mistakes. Deceptions. They compromise his missions - his life.

When a liar calls you an ally, it means you are enemies.

His world is inside out and upside down. The life that lies buried in the whorls of his brain is bubbling up to the surface, bright and warm amid the sticky red mess all his missions have been. He remembers that in New York there are four distinct seasons, and that the summer sun will bleach your hair and paint your skin with tawny honey tones. That honey is a word with more than one meaning. That in August it's warm all night.

He has no C.O.

No assignment.

But he knows who his enemies are, now, and remembers where their safe-houses lie. Their labs. Their armories.

Steve is afraid everything is bugged. That he's being watched as he looks for Bucky. Followed. Used as bait. Used as a bloodhound. Or that Bucky has already been caught and no one will ever have the decency to tell him.

Sam and Steve are not spies. It becomes painfully apparent to Natasha as she follows them. Still, knowing your weakness is half the battle. She can't fault them – they knew that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. But determination can only carry them so far. She'll pick up their slack.

She's reinventing herself as a friend, because Steve Rogers deserves to have at least one thing go entirely his way at least once in a century. He deserves better than that, but this is the best she can give him.

She picks off the agents on Steve's tail, doubling back behind him and leaving the unsuspecting operatives unconscious and bloodied in her wake.

When she sits down beside Steve on a park bench as he tries – hopelessly - to look inconspicuous, he's so glad to see her that his eyes well over and he hugs her tight.

She can hear his wet breath in her ear as it catches in his throat when he whispers his thanks.

She concedes to herself that friendship has its merits. The embrace is warm and enormous. Soothing and invigorating at once. A reminder of the point: happiness exists and is hers for the taking.

Natasha dumps all the tech that Steve and Sam are carrying and replaces it with the items she's made herself. No chance of being traced or tracked or hacked.

They're near Virginia when an old contact tells Natasha that there was an execution in the punishment block of a remote Russian prison. It was a man. But it can't be the soldier. She's sure of it. He wouldn't go quietly. She checks Reuters, but there isn't even a whisper of it. It would be there, buried in a boring political post, but legible to anyone who knew what they were looking for. There's nothing. So the dead man was likely someone higher up. One of their own, born and bred, executed before word could get around of what he'd been doing and people could start asking questions.

Still, she doesn't tell Steve. He doesn't need any more ups and downs.

Langley is in chaos, but that has been the case everywhere since S.H.I.E.L.D. was ripped up by the roots. If Barnes was here, the place would have been easy pickings. But everything is so chaotic, it's impossible to determine whether he was the source of the disorder.

Natasha consulted with Hill before she came after Steve. Brazil had been Maria's recommendation.

Hill is sharp. Barnes is there, looking for old Hydra agents. And new ones.

Steve, Sam, and Nat see him slipping into the windows of a nondescript government office building in the dead of night.

It's all Steve can do not to scream Bucky's name at the top of his lungs. He's desperate for Bucky to see him.

But he doesn't have to shout. The wind changes direction and picks up speed as Barnes is leaving the building, climbing out the window and preparing to jump to the ground.

Natasha sees him stop on the window ledge.

It's like watching a deer.

The man is standing stock still with his neck extended and his nostrils flared.

He's sniffing the air.

Natasha is shaking her head faintly in disbelief, a tiny rhythm of no no no. And then Bucky's eyes are pointed straight at Steve. They remain that way for three seconds before Barnes nods once, jumps, and disappears around the corner.

They can't even find his footprints when they reach the spot he should have landed.

“What the hell was that?” Sam pants.

“He could smell me,” Steve breathes. “He was downwind.”

Nat nods and Sam's eyebrows lift for a split second. He's been operating under the assumption that Bucky's mind is mostly gone and he's been chasing the Winter Soldier. But that little nod of the head – a silent hello – means that Sam has to recast the man in his mind. And he's glad, because Steve's friend is coming to the fore, and that can only be called progress.

When they're hiding out in motel rooms and empty barns, Natasha tries to teach Sam and Steve how to blend in. How to sweep their gear and surroundings for bugs. How to make people want to look away from them as they walk down the street. How to observe without staring. How to avoid detection by the all-pervasive objects of surveillance – traffic cams, security systems, and oblivious bystanders shooting selfies for their instagram accounts.

She instructs them to grow beards and let their clothes get worn and grubby. It obscures their faces and ages them. They look poor, and nothing turns a gaze away quite as effectively as poverty.

They're still in Brazil three days later when Nat is scanning Reuters headlines again.

There's been a fire. Czech Republic. In a lab at the school of mechanical engineering. But Nat knows it's not just any lab. She tells them that they have to get to Plzen. Now.

It's the same story all across Europe.

At best they're a few hours late. At worst, whole days. Barnes is not taking the shortest route, which would be predictable. He's moving randomly, at what has to be an incredible inconvenience, even if it is keeping him successful.

Here and there, military officials, law enforcement members, university professors, and scientific researchers are abandoning their posts and fleeing to safe-houses, hoping to avoid the storm that's coming.

Agent Hill is intercepting them.

Natasha sees Steve up at four in the morning. His shoulders are sagging and his head is down.

Still a soldier, not a spy.

Waiting is wearing on him. He feels as useful as a moldy piece of bread.

“I want you and Sam to go back to DC,” she says, and Steve looks up, defeated, but opens his mouth to argue anyway. She cuts him off. “If I don't catch him here, there's a good chance he'll go back there - you're the only person left on the planet with whom he has shared life experiences.”

Her left eyebrow is wry on her otherwise impassive face. A smile flickers on Steve's lips.

Without two tall, broad, and obviously military men to worry about and weigh her down, Natasha can move more swiftly and discretely.

She finds Barnes in a bank in Bern, copying financial records. When in doubt, follow the money.

“You're here to kill me,” he says, not looking up, face lit from below by the faint glow of the screen perched on his lap. It gives him that haunted look from old movies and makes the shadows under his eyes even darker.

“That's not the plan,” she says. “But it depends on you.”

“Do it,” he says, expressionless. “And then take this drive to Captain Rogers.”

She shakes her head.

“I'm the last thing this world needs,” he says, and she knows he means it. His voice is level. His face is smooth.

He's been a good boy and now he'd like his reward.

A mercy-killing, please ma'am.

After all he's seen, it seems like so little to ask.

“Steve would disagree,” she tells him.

“He doesn't know the half of it.”

“You're right,” she concedes. “He knows the whole of it.”

Barnes's mouth goes slack and the color leaves his lips. His eyes are wide and his nostrils flare twice.

“I was the one who gave him your file,” she confesses. “And all he was interested in was how he could use it to find you.”

“I'm not who he's looking for.”

“If you have what you need, we should go,” she says, when he grabs the drive and climbs to his feet.

“It's yours,” he says, trying to hand it over, but she won't take it. “You his friend?”

“Yes,” she answers, eyes unblinking.

“Don't do this to him.”

Natasha brings Barnes back anyway, chiding him for underestimating their friend, Steven Grant Rogers.

“I'm not underestimating him,” Barnes says. “You're overestimating me.”

“Don't sell yourself short, sergeant,” she says, as she ushers him into agent Hill's armored car and nods her head once in farewell.

Hill hands the drive off to Stark and takes Barnes into a reinforced room in one of Tony's labs.

Two chairs and a table. Two cups of black coffee. No guards. No glass divider to protect her. No restraints.

A show of faith.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Barnes asks, silently pulling out her chair and waiting for her to take her seat before he sinks into his own.

It startles her when he speaks. His accent is old. Foreign. Brooklyn accents have evolved since his day. And he never makes any noise. It's easy to forget he's capable of sound.

“You were a prisoner of war,” Hill says.

“Polite way to put it,” he huffs. “You good at politics?”

“God no. Field work. But at the moment we're undermanned, so I don't have the option.”

He nods.

She asks him to tell her everything he remembers.

“I remember washing the blood off the front of his white shirt. Running it under cold water until my fingers went numb and the stains were gone.”

To her credit, she doesn't try to steer him onto other topics.

“Is that your earliest memory?” she asks.

“Visual memory. At the moment,” he says.

“Do you remember how the shirt got bloody?”

“Not specifically, but I can guess. You met him?” Barnes asks.

She nods.

“Stubborn guy. And not a lick of self-preservation.”

She smiles.

The Winter Soldier's memories come to him more easily. Closer to the surface. Connected. And his captors had to be careful not to damage or destroy any of his skills when they wiped his mind after his missions. Barnes is good at patterns, and his brain can follow the trails of blood back through the decades until they dry up and leave a blank so warm and white his mind almost shies from it. A wall of fire behind his eyes. Like staring at the sun. But there's blood on the other side, too, and that's familiar, so that's what his memory finds first. The darkness in all that light.

He remembers Zola's experiments. Never enough to kill him, only enough to make it harder to die, prolonging his misery.

He remembers Captain Rogers leaping through a cloud of flames. Remembers him with broken noses and bloody lips. Split knuckles and scuffed knees. With with bloodless wounds that were somehow worse.

Asthma.

High blood pressure.

Endless infections in his throat, ears, and sinuses.

Remembers a tiny blond body bowed beneath the exhaustion that came from fighting itself for its life. Remembers a full-lipped fool-mouth that kept finding fresh ways to get itself smacked.

Remembers six sorts of broken heart.

Steve arrives at hour seven of Hill's interview. She's reviewing everything she's recorded about the Winter Soldier's activities, making sure the details stay the same and hoping new information comes to the surface.

Tony assumed that Steve already knew Barnes was back - that Romanoff would have told him about it before she did anything else.

When over five hours passed and there was no sign of the Cap, Stark sent Banner to pick up Rogers, wary of phones and the risk of surveillance on Steve's end.

Natasha hadn't wanted to lose so much as a minute in following the leads Barnes had given her; she trusted Hill to call Steve.

But Hill has to be as hard and cautious as Fury was. Officially, anyway. Unofficially, there are always loopholes: Tony Stark's big mouth is a walking workaround.

Now Steve is on the outside of the glass looking in. He's not in uniform, but he has his shield with him. His eyes are shadowed and his whole body is tense.

Tony has been listening to the interrogation all along, but now that Steve is here, he has JARVIS route the audio from the rest of the lab into the cell.

“Did you give Sergeant Barnes food, water, sleep, a shower, and a change of clothes, agent?” Steve asks, and Hill goes still.

“The sooner I have this intel, the sooner he can get out of here.”

“So, that's a no,” Steve says, pinching the bridge of his nose and then dragging his hand down his face.

Barnes can see him through the glass. See the way his jaw is set and he's frowning. It's inexplicably familiar.

“He can get outta there any time he wants to, Hill, don't kid yourself. And S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't have a leg to stand on or a pot to piss in.”

Stark loves it when Rogers is angry - as long as it's not at him - because he knows it's always deserved; Cap is nothing if not fair. And Stark knows that Steve's sass predates his physique. He likes to picture ninety-eight pounds of man with ten tons of attitude. He finds the fact that Steve didn't get himself killed more remarkable than the changes wrought by the serum. And he knows the former has everything to do with the man behind the glass.

When agent Hill is finally finished – three hours later - she nods at Barnes and they both rise. JARVIS opens the cell so that they may leave. As they near the door, Barnes stops and gestures at it, waving Hill through first.

There's a faint halt in her step, still reluctant to turn her back on him, but she follows through and walks out to where Captain Rogers is waiting.

Mal'ak ha-mashhit, Barnes thinks, looking at Rogers.

“All yours, Captain,” she says.

“He's his own, Hill, and don't you dare forget it.”

Barnes watches Rogers' right arm: he keeps his shield aimed at the agent until she's out of sight. Barnes thinks it should be aimed at him.

The bearded man in the lab is still there, swiping rapidly through images on a screen. Bucky's been watching him throughout his interview. The stranger is remarkably relaxed for a man who's on his eleventh cup of coffee. He has smirked every time the Captain has chided agent Hill. His face is familiar.

“Safe rooms every third floor, above ground and below,” the man says. “You boys have a preference?”

“Anything with a view?” Barnes jokes, though the jest doesn't touch his face.

“Everything above ground has a view. You can see out, but no one can see in. Glass is two feet thick... technically it's not glass, it's a composite-” Tony cuts himself off after he sees Steve's jaw flex. He hops off his stool and walks over.

“Bucky Barnes, this is Tony Stark,” Steve says. “Tony, this is Bucky.”

Stark extends his hand, but Barnes has gone still. His eyes are wet and he has his lips clamped between his teeth. He's looking for the exits and unconsciously trying to hide his left arm behind his back.

Stark was there throughout the interview.

“Buck?” Steve says, softly.

“It's okay, Cap,” Tony says, keeping his voice smooth and low.

“I'm sorry,” Bucky breathes.

“Shit happens, kiddo,” Stark says. “Sorry, I keep forgetting you're ninety-seven years old.”

Steve still looks bewildered.

“Turns out my parents' car accident wasn't entirely accidental,” Tony says, and Steve's face goes pale. Stark just shrugs.

“Everyone in our little clique has a lot of blood on their hands, Barnes. I'm a weapons manufacturer. Romanoff was an assassin, still is, really, just traded teams. Bruce is basically a bomb that can go off indefinitely – and frequently does. Thor is like some mash-up of the orders of angels... or maybe the Valar and the Maiar. And you and Cap here are a couple boys from Brooklyn that a couple governments decided to weaponize.” Stark shrugs again and waves it all off with his hand. “Water under the bridge.”

Bucky's jaw flexes and he gives a crisp, but grateful nod. Steve flashes Tony a tight smile.

“Make yourselves at home, guys. JARVIS is at your service. Only Romanoff, Banner, and Hill know you're here, but they won't be around for a while. They're going to hunt down the people who are hoping to hunt you down.”

“I could help,” Barnes offers. “Bait the trap.”

“Way ahead of you,” Stark says, and pulls up a file on another floating screen.

“You made a decoy,” Steve murmurs, looking at the specs.

A titanium frame that bears Bucky's build and a replica of his arm. Over the face there's a mask like the one Stark made for Nat, but this time it's Bucky's visage.

“You're gonna help by not helping,” Stark says slowly, glaring not-quite-unkindly at Steve. “Lay low here until Nat gives the green light. And then you're free to lay low somewhere else if you want. Or help S.H.I.E.L.D. turn into the next shitshow it's destined to become. Or star in a broadway musical. I've seen grainy old footage of the Captain America Tour - love the bit with the motorcycle, by the way.”

Steve rolls his eyes and prays that Natasha is swift and merciless.

“Come on,” Tony says, motioning for them to follow. “Let's get you checked out and settled in.”

He leads them through a labyrinth of hallways before he finally rounds the corner into a medical lab.

When Steve passes through the door he hears Bucky's pulse and breathing speed up to ten times their resting rates behind him. When, he turns, his nose catches the scent of urine. Bucky's face is as white as bone and there's sweat on his upper lip. His eyes and mouth are wide and his nostrils are flared. There's a tremor running through him.

Tony Stark has to admit that, for a genius, he's an idiot: he just brought a vet who was the subject of medical experiments into a room full of vials, needles, gurneys, wires, and monitors.

Steve slowly walks up to Bucky until they're only an inch apart, flooding his friend's field of vision with the one familiar sight he has handy: Steve knows his eyes are the only parts of him that haven't changed.

“Buck,” Steve whispers. “Focus on me, 'kay? It's May sixth, two thousand fourteen. We're at Tony Stark's place in New York. The trouble is all in the past, and no one's gonna hurt you here.”

Barnes is clenching his jaw, but he's nodding.

“Let's get you some dinner and some shut-eye, huh punk?”

Barnes blinks and nods again.

“You keep your eyes on me and take ten steps backward, nice and easy,” Steve says. “Just like that.”

Stark has JARVIS escort them up to the safe room, with soft instructions from unseen speakers and an elevator opening of its own accord.

The AI is plugged in everywhere. It's as bad as Hydra. Surveillance with manners.

Up in their room, Bucky rushes to the toilet and vomits. Steve hands him a glass of water and then Bucky peels off his clothes and climbs into the shower.

JARVIS keeps them abreast of the deliveries he's making to their room: clothes in their sizes, toiletries, meals. The items arrive in a chute that reminds Steve of a dumbwaiter. Before the serum he was always small enough to fit in one.

They eat in determined silence, dutifully emptying their plates of eggs, bacon, toast, and melon.

Steve takes the couch after he puts Bucky in the bed.

Steve is still awake three hours later when Bucky gets up and asks JARVIS if there's anything he can type on. JARVIS sends a laptop and Bucky starts filling it with the details that have been coming back to him. Separate files for before the war, during the war, and after. He wants to purge the Winter Soldier's life from his skin. But he doesn't know how long and dark the stranger's history is. Doesn't know what percentage of the whole he has recovered yet - how long he'll be dredging up these memories. It's like dragging a lake for one body and finding an army.

Steve asks for a tablet and stylus. He spends his time sketching as quietly as he can and exchanging heavily coded emails with Natasha.

Bucky begins communicating with Natasha the following day. Confirming, denying, and augmenting the intel she sends his way, and passing on plenty of his own.

Neither of the men really sleeps.

Stark offers to build Bucky an arm that won't connect to his nervous system. That will have a mind of its own embedded in its circuitry.

Bucky tells him that the only mind he wants governing his movements is the one between his ears. Steve doesn't even try to hide his smirk.

When Natasha says it's no longer too dangerous to do so, Steve starts looking for a safe house of his own. Not under anyone's nose or in their debt.

He wants privacy. Space. Grass. Sky.

Stark's tower isn't home. Neither was DC. And Brooklyn isn't either, anymore, loath as Steve is to admit it. He doesn't really recognize it now. It's just a constant reminder of all he's lost.

Nathasha acts as some hybrid of a realtor and a matchmaker. Looking at satellite photos of the houses to narrow down defensible options and then researching the records of the previous owners and all the neighbors.

Steve settles on a Romanoff-approved farmhouse upstate. Old and made of stone. Up on a hill. Good vantage point. Backed up against a State Forest and no neighbors on either side for miles.

Steve tells Bucky that they're moving and Bucky doesn't ask any questions or offer any resistance.

They're both eager to have unseen eyes off their backs. To have space to breathe.

Nat won't let Steve bring anything from his apartment in DC. She said they'd have to destroy everything to get the bugs out of it anyway, as half of them had been embedded in the furniture in the first place. So Steve's starting from scratch all over again.

He thinks he should be used to it by now.

The big house stands largely empty. There are two beds, two desks, two dressers, and a dining room table with chairs.

Part of Steve likes the way the tall ceilings and empty rooms make him feel small again. It's not a thing he ever thought he'd miss. But he spent the bulk of his conscious life in that tiny body. It was his. It got him where he is today, and he owes it a debt he can never repay because he gave the fragile little thing away. Killed the scrappy, sickly kid from Brooklyn so that he could go to war.

Of all the fool things to do.

But this bigger body let him get Bucky back, so Steve can't linger in regret for very long.

Bucky likes that there are no obstructions to disrupt his line of sight in the empty rooms of the old house. It also means there are fewer places for any bugs to be concealed. He approves of the sturdy stone walls – thick enough to stop bullets. It's quiet without the constant hum of traffic and electricity – he can hear people coming. He can get a clear view of their surroundings from every window. He can hear the birds outside, and if they all go silent at once he can look out to see why. A hawk or cat, usually. Or Steve. Bucky uses crickets the same way: an alarm no one can disable.

Steve worries about PTSD. Whether he'll even be able to tell if either of them has it. Because they are the sort of men that other people want to kill; it's not paranoia if everyone really is out to get you.

They still don't sleep well. They hear the owls out in the trees, reminding them of night, but they've forgotten what that word means.

Bucky is still mining his memories for any morsel of information that might prove useful to Hill and Romanoff.

Steve is waiting. Treading water. He makes their meals and cleans up and orders their groceries.

They have to have everything delivered. They're not allowed to go into town. Not allowed close enough to the road that they might be recognized. Steve can't even tell Sam where they are, and that stings.

Bucky takes baths instead of showers.

When Steve first heard the water running, he was relieved, thinking Bucky was finally going to relax. But, by the end of it, Steve realized the real reasons for it. If Bucky takes a bath, he can leave the bathroom while the water is running so that he's able to hear his surroundings more clearly. Then he can bathe in silence with the bathroom door open so that his location will be less obvious to a stranger walking into the house.

Steve tries to make conversation while they eat together. Club sandwiches today, because they have so many things Steve loves on them and the ingredients retain their individuality while complementing each other perfectly. He likes having to stretch his jaw as wide as it will go to take a bite. And he likes watching tomato juice drip down through the cleft in Bucky's chin.

“I think I'm gonna do a garden,” Steve says, and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Try to, anyway. Tomatoes and cucumbers. Green beans are supposed to be easy. Maybe zucchini. Watermelon and pumpkins for sure. Lettuce. Herbs. Any requests?”

“Just make sure it's not deep enough or dense enough that a sniper could use it for cover.”

Steve blinks twice but nods.

Steve rises early every day to go running. He always asks if Bucky would like to join him. The answer is always, “I've got work to do.”

It's always true.

He's working for Hill as an intelligence analyst. He's good at picking up patterns and picking out irregularities. Seeing the handwriting of a spy in the scrawl of someone's schedule.

Steve feels like a fifth wheel and asks Hill if there's anything he can do, but she seems to see him as some sort of geriatric meat-head. She says she wants him to keep an eye on Barnes. He tells her he's already keeping both eyes on Bucky.

Steve spends his days trying to get a handle on his garden and peering into the internet like it's a window.

Watching nature documentaries. Travel diaries. Cooking shows and tours of the world's cuisines.

He doesn't understand why everyone thinks the world is getting smaller just because technology makes it easier to talk to people at great distances. The world feels bigger to him every day. Each new face he sees makes the planet's population more real to him, and the number is staggering. New species are discovered while old ones are lost forever. Most of the planet is covered in ocean and hardly any of it has been explored. Subcultures Steve never even dreamed of are invented all the time.

He could live a thousand years and never see or understand a tenth of his world.

It's still warm at ten pm, so Steve climbs the stairs and leans in Bucky's darkened door, knocking lightly on the frame. The glow of a laptop screen is the only illumination in the space.

“You know, there's a lake in the middle of that park behind us,” Steve begins, and he can't keep the smile out of his voice. “You wanna go skinny dipping?”

“We have to stay on this lot,” Bucky tells him.

“Who's gonna know?” Steve says, and gives a light shrug of his right shoulder.

“If anything goes wrong, everyone's gonna know.”

Five minutes later, Bucky hears Steve's feet going down the stairs and then the brush of the back door opening, shutting, and clicking with the turn of a key. When he looks out his window, he can see Steve jogging toward the park with a towel slung over his shoulders.

Steve floats on his back and stares up at the stars. If he could look down on himself, he'd see his face surrounded by the reflection of the night sky - the milky way flickering as it's warped by the ripples of his swimming.

When Steve gets up the next morning, Bucky is exactly where he left him. And he knows Bucky didn't sleep, because when Bucky sleeps, he dreams, and when he dreams, he shouts.

“You gotta get some sleep, Buck, you're gonna burn yourself out.”

“I'm not saving myself up for anything. The more I get done now, the less there's gonna be for other people to worry about down the road.”

“You don't have to kill yourself over this,” Steve says. “You don't owe anyone your life. This isn't some debt you're obliged to repay or some apology you have to make. You know that, right?”

“I killed two thousand people,” Bucky says.

“So did I.”

  
  
  


2 These Days

 

After two months in the house, Steve wakes at dawn to the distant sound of metal hitting metal.

When he checks Bucky's room, it's empty. When he goes back into his own bedroom to grab his shield, it's gone.

He takes the stairs in two bounds and is out the front door and running, circling the property as he seeks the source of the sound.

He finds it in the center of the back field.

There's a huge hunk of granite with an oak tree above it. The boulder was too big to bother moving, so the farmer chose that spot to plant a tree a century ago, hoping its branches would shield the fields from wind and its roots would anchor the soil.

Bucky is on his knees beside the boulder, with his left side flush against the rock. His left arm is reaching up toward the sky while his right arm is wielding Steve's shield like an ax, punching it over his head and slamming its edge into his arm, smashing and tearing the metal as it whirrs and sparks.

“Bucky?” Steve says, walking slowly and in a good line of sight, not wanting to spook his friend.

“I need it off me,” Bucky says, and holds out the shield, silently begging Steve to take over.

Bucky presses his belly to the stone and stretches his left arm out to his side so that Steve can hit it from the angle he couldn't reach on his own.

“Where do you start under there?” Steve asks.

“I have five inches of humerus. It's about four inches in diameter.”

Steve nods and starts swinging. When he has the lower three quarters of the arm sheared off, he starts denting the remainder with careful swings, and then pulling away the segments with his hands.

“I need to do the rest inside,” Steve says, and they head in.

He sets Bucky up in the spare bedroom that serves as his studio. Just an easel, a table tall enough to hold his art supplies within easy reach, and an adjustable stool to perch on.

He sits Bucky down and aims the swiveling head of the lamp up into the shell of his arm. Steve can see the framework and the attachments of the outer panels. See the scarred skin. See the clamps that bracket Bucky's actual arm and anchor the metal to meat.

Bucky stares at the drawing that's pinned to Steve's easel. The page is covered in quick charcoal studies of ballerinas. Steve likes to watch youtube videos of dancers, gymnasts, and other athletes and then pause them, set a timer for no more than a minute, and make himself draw the pose. Then he advances the video, stops it again, and repeats the process.

Bucky's eyes rove over the flexing of calves and the flutter of skirts. The long necks and poised arms. The expressions of the hands, like calligraphy in flesh. The shadows Steve made by dragging fingertips swiftly through the charcoal.

Every thirty seconds or so Bucky hears metal falling to the floor and wobbling there briefly before falling still and silent.

“Fuck,” Steve breathes.

He has the outer shell removed. Now all that's left is the anchor. But there are bolts running right through Bucky's arm.

“Now unscrew the nuts, pull out the bolts, and slide off the brackets,” Bucky says, calmly.

“Buck, they're in the bone.”

“I know.”

“It'll hurt.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees. “But it'll be the last time.”

Steve sets his jaw and gets to work, carefully bracing the metal with his left hand while the fingertips of his right hand work at unscrewing the nuts.

All too soon, they're off, and Steve can't delay any longer.

“Fast or slow?” Steve asks.

“Fast.”

Steve pulls the lowest bolt free with a yank so quick it makes Bucky's lips quirk into the first real smile Steve has seen from his friend in seven decades.

But blood drips down from the hole in Bucky's arm to rain on Steve's parade.

Bucky hears the heavy patter on the hardwood floor.

“It's normal. Keep going.”

“It's not normal,” Steve gripes, and rips the next bolt free.

Two more and Steve is finished.

The first hole has already stopped bleeding.

“Do you need me to flush those and put drains in them?” Steve asks, frowning at the wounds.

“No, they'll be fine in a minute.”

“What started this?” Steve asks.

“Nightmare.”

Steve wipes the blood off the floor and goes downstairs to make breakfast.

Bucky doesn't mention that the nightmare involved his metal fingers crushing Steve's throat.

Bucky doesn't mind that he can't type as swiftly with one arm. He's running low on the Winter Soldier's memories. These days, the things that come bubbling up into his head are primarily from his own past.

But his analytical skills are as sharp as ever, and Hill keeps him busy with data to decipher. He's grateful for the distraction.

But it's not enough.

Memories begin to trickle out of his mind, so meager and infrequent that it never occurs to Bucky that the flimsy things are accumulating. Amounting to something. A history. A foundation, however dusty, fractured and out of date.

The new memories he makes each day are shuffled between the old ones like cards.

Most of them are nothing extraordinary, old or new. A four of clubs or seven of diamonds.

Steve quietly making him breakfast.

Steve, surveying his face and saying, “You look good, Buck,” when he sees that the shadows under Bucky's eyes are a shade lighter and the flesh a hair fuller.

But there are colorful jacks and queens in the deck, too. Bright and inescapable.

Steve makes milkshakes and the taste reminds Bucky of the possibly-first – he can't be sure – time he saw Steve drink one.

Steve was tiny, but it was warm out and he was feeling well and Bucky had some change to spare, so he took them both out for a treat.

Bucky could barely see the blues of Steve's eyes through the fans of his lashes. Pretty as a girl's.

Prettier.

Longer, darker, and thicker.

Steve was staring down into the cup and watching the fluffy little mounds of half-melted ice cream as they bobbed toward his lips when he lifted his glass.

After Steve's last swig, Bucky leaned in and pointed his finger at Steve's upper lip.

“Your mustache is coming in,” Bucky said, and Steve's eyebrows lifted.

Then Bucky swiped his finger across the cream perched on Steve's cupid's bow and popped it between his own lips.

“Tastes blond,” Bucky teased, and Steve elbowed him.

“I hope there was hair in that, jerk.”

Steve's cheeks had been pink and Bucky had filled with a warm feeling that he had deemed victory at the time.

Sometimes there's an ace.

Steve, asleep in the apartment they shared before the war, their beds just four feet apart. Early spring, but warm enough to have the windows open. Steve was on his back with his arms thrown over his head and one sweet pink bud of a nipple was bared for Bucky's eyes where the blankets dipped low. Steve's erection was tenting the sheets, bobbing every now and again, with pleasant dreams, or the breeze, or possibly just the urge to piss. Steve's hair was an inviting mess, and Bucky half-wanted to run his fingers through it to rumple it further, but he didn't want to risk breaking the spell. There wasn't much in Bucky's book that could beat sleeping through church on a sunny Sunday morning and having Steve all to himself. Steve was helpless and surrendered there. Belly up and naked but for threadbare sheets. Adrift on the trust they'd built together over a decade. Mind lost in dreams and body left behind in Bucky's keeping. Bucky let himself bask in it. The soft whisper of Steve's breathing, clear and even in a way that was far too foreign. The faint scent of him, a bit more fragrant in the morning the way men always are. The color of his skin: peaches where Bucky's was cream, though Steve's flesh saw far less sun. Steve slowly waking, and those long lashes fluttering over those impossible eyes, like the flicker of the projector in a dark theater. Steve's body stretching and arching slightly off the bed, cock still standing proud above slim hips, before he sagged back into the mattress with a sigh and a squeaking of springs. He let his head fall to the side until he was looking at Bucky.

“Eggs on toast?” Bucky asked, and Steve hummed and nodded, but closed his eyes again.

They didn't move for another hour.

Sometimes the deck spits out a joker.

It was four in the morning in the middle of February, when life is supposed to have the decency to leave you alone. Valentine's day, but it had no love for Steve.

Bucky woke when he heard Steve make a strange sound in the back of his throat. It was followed by blankets shuffling, the bed squeaking, and two bony feet hitting the floor.

“You okay?” Bucky croaked.

“Buck, go back to bed, goddammit,” Steve answered.

Bucky's heart sped up in his drowsy chest.

Steve never swore. Not when he stubbed his toe. Not when he coughed until he cracked a rib. Not when some asshole broke his nose. Not for anything, ever, even if there weren't women or kids around.

“You sick?” Bucky asked, already sitting up in bed and reaching to turn the light on, then squinting as his eyes adjusted.

“I'm always sick,” Steve choked, bitter, nearly snapping. “Buck, don't look at me, turn the light off. Right now, Buck, I mean it.”

Bucky shook his head no and stood up to step closer.

Steve was backing away toward the bathroom door.

“What is it?” Bucky asked, but Steve just shook his head from side to side with tears on his cheeks.

The tears had Bucky terrified to the point that his knees started shaking; crying was up there with swearing on the list of things that Steve didn't let himself do.

“Go back to bed,” Steve begged.

But by then Bucky could smell it.

The sickly-sweet stink of shit.

“How long have you had the runs?” Bucky asked, frightened and furious with himself for missing it.

“Found out just now,” Steve sighed.

From beneath a barrage of protests, Bucky helped Steve out of the soiled pajamas to keep the mess to a minimum and then threw them in a pail and took them over to the wash tub to start cleaning them up.

“Buck, don't, please, I'll do it - it's dirty.”

“It ain't nothin'.”

“You'll get sick.”

“I'd already have it by now if I was gonna get it,” Bucky soothed, and hustled Steve off into their tiny bathroom.

Bucky unmade the bed and washed the spot on the sheets with boiling water while Steve was getting cleaned up.

When Bucky was tugging the sheets off the mattress, he heard paper rustling. After he hung the bedding to dry between the kitchen cupboards, he went back to see what had made the noise.

Drawings.

Figure studies, with Steve posing for himself in the mirror, the lines sure and fluid in a way that meant they'd been drawn very fast. Nudes, with all the wonderful little ribs and the nobs of the spine. The fragile neck and limbs. The inviting bowl of the pelvis. The shoulder blades, like wings folded at Steve's back.

One sketch was an incredible study in foreshortening: Steve looking down over his own belly at his tightly fisted cock, perfectly capturing the tension in the fingers and the texture of the hair. The bones and musculature showing plainly with no fat to obscure them. No idealization. Like Schiele. Bare and raw.

And there were drawings of Bucky. Pieces of him, anyway. His face, for the most part, over and over, with his lips and eyes taking turns being the focus of the studies, as though Steve couldn't settle on a favorite. Sometimes his arms made an appearance, carefully built up in grey tones that brought out the bulk Bucky had built up. Steve's gaze at once reverent and covetous.

Bucky looked at the sketches for less than twenty seconds all told, but the images are forever fresh in his mind.

He remembers trying to wrap his head around a world that couldn't see that Steve was beautiful. A world that had Steve hiding the beautiful things that he had made under his bed while the beautiful thing that he was went unwanted and unworshiped.

Bucky had invited Steve to sleep in his bed for the rest of that night, though it took some coaxing. Steve insisted on sleeping on a towel in case he got sick in his sleep again. And then he wept into Bucky's shoulder for over an hour before he fell asleep.

Bucky was equal parts relieved and devastated. Relieved that Steve knew he could go to pieces – that there was no need for soldiering through. No stiff upper lip. No sucking it up. Just honest exhaustion and catharsis. But Bucky had never seen Steve sobbing - not during any illness, injury, or insult. And Bucky was afraid the tears meant that Steve had run out of the will to keep fighting – to keep living. That tiny white flags were streaming down Steve's cheeks and soaking into his shirt. That Steve's body had finally broken his spirit and he was handing himself over to long-looming death.

When Bucky woke up, Steve was tucked under his right arm, watching him.

“Sorry for the mess,” Steve whispered, lowering his eyes.

“You don't owe me apologies,” Bucky said, shaking his head.

“Thanks for the help.”

“Don't owe me thanks either, punk. Just get your health back, and we'll call it even.”

“Never had any to begin with,” Steve huffed. “How'm I s'posed to get it back?”

And Bucky didn't want to think about it, so he just squeezed Steve's shoulder, tossed his right leg over Steve's left leg, and dragged them both back down to sleep.

In September, Steve starts listening to music while he cooks. Bucky comes out glaring the first time it happens, staring down from the second story landing while Steve looks up and shrugs.

“We won't be able to hear what's going on outside,” Bucky says slowly, as though Steve is stupid.

“If someone wants to come out here and put me down, that's on them,” Steve says. “I'm not gonna stop living in the meantime. And if I'm gonna bite it, I'd like to do it with music in my ears.”

Bucky frowns slightly, but nods.

Steve listens to strange music.

Bucky doesn't recognize it.

A nasal, wavering, and nonetheless-lovely vocalist telling him to “go straight to hell, boy.”

A low, dry, hollow voice that sings of seeing young men with a weight on their shoulders and begging to know where they've been.

It lures him and haunts him all at once.

The following Sunday, Steve is singing along with Ella Fitzgerald while he cooks breakfast, making his voice go high and airy and then low and warbly along with hers. Steve likes her Cheek to Cheek better than Fred Astaire's, and Bucky is inclined to agree. He's in bed, listening as the two voices mingle and drift up the steps. He can smell the bacon Steve is frying. By now, Bucky knows that the eggs will be perfect, because Steve lets them finish cooking on the plate, not the pan, and Steve keeps their plates in the oven so they'll be hot and won't suck all the heat out of the food.

In thirty seconds Steve will call him down to eat.

All these tiny pieces, like little puffs of air, are fanning the flame in Bucky's heart into something bigger and brighter until he can't pretend he doesn't recognize it.

Bucky begins to seek sleep.

He tells himself it's a means of escape.

But the thing is elusive. Silence has begun to make him nervous. His fear of being sought and found has faded and an old fear has arisen to take its place.

He remembers the night he couldn't hear Steve breathing, back in their apartment in Brooklyn. Steve had been sick all week, which was nothing new, but it had never been this bad before. His lungs had been so full of phlegm and fluid that it sounded like an engine sputtering with every breath Steve took. And then Bucky couldn't hear anything, and that was so much worse. He had been watching Steve, stretched out on his own tiny bed, pretending to read while his eyes followed the shallow rising and falling of his best friend's sunken breast.

But Bucky had fallen asleep.

He woke to silence and was certain that Steve had died. And died alone.

He rushed over to crouch above the tiny body, apologizing and shaking Steve's narrow shoulders.

Steve's eyelashes fluttered.

“Whaddaya want, jerk?” Steve croaked, and Bucky dove down and kissed him on the mouth, then took Steve's face in his hands and turned it every which way, planting more kisses on his cheeks, nose, and forehead while Steve just smiled and laughed softly to himself as Bucky's tears fell onto his face and drew wet tickling paths down his cheeks.

“Thought I was a goner, huh?” Steve teased. “You ain't gettin' rid of me so easy.”

“Likewise, punk,” Bucky sobbed.

These days, Bucky slips down the hall in the dead of night - walking along the edges of the floor, close to the wall where the boards don't creak – until he's standing in Steve's room.

Steve never shuts his door. Bucky wonders if it's an expression of trust.

Or an invitation.

Bucky waits for his pulse to stop roaring in his own ears and looks for the corresponding motion in Steve's throat. The undulation of the soft skin below the jaw, giving away Steve's heartbeat. And then he listens for Steve's breath, slow and unfettered, synched with the gentle rise and fall of Steve's newly-broad breast.

He bathes in these subtle signs of life until his own pulse and breathing have aligned with Steve's and he's certain that Steve's heart is going to keep beating and his lungs are going to keep breathing.

Thus satisfied, Bucky can crawl back to bed and fall asleep.

And he's seen Steve's charts. He knows he's being irrational; the man is the acme of human health.

But this is some sort of muscle memory that Bucky just can't shake. The relentless drum buried deep in his chest, stubbornly seeking its old rhythms.

He needs to know that Steve is well. Needs to do the legwork himself. Gather the intelligence. Because he knows there's always a chance that someone else got it wrong. Or lied. And he just can't risk taking their word for it.

By the end of October, Steve's gardens are finished for the season and he's filling his free time with reading, so he finally buys a couch. It's a huge tufted leather affair from Restoration Hardware that cost as much as a car, but it was the only thing he could find that left him reasonably confident it could stand up to his weight. It's long enough for him to stretch out on. Deep enough that two bodies could comfortably recline side by side if they were so inclined.

After that, he gets a coffee table from an artist who sets glass in the shape of bodies of water into the wood.

Then a thick wool rug to muffle footsteps.

Two chairs, in case Sam and Natasha are free to come some day. Or Thor. Maybe Barton.

When he's done, it almost looks like someone lives in the place.

After twelve months of aborted conversations, failed attempts to lure Bucky down memory lane, silent meals together, rejected invitations to watch movies, refusals to go running, objections to swimming, and Bucky removing himself from the room whenever Steve starts to draw his portrait, Steve finally decides that he's being disrespectful and opts to surrender.

He makes two sandwiches for lunch, leaves one in the fridge for Bucky and calls up the stairs to tell his friend that it's there. He takes his own plate out back, where he hung a bird feeder last spring, and sits down to eat with the sparrows.

They've always been his favorite; they're the sort of bird he was when he was a boy. His brothers. Plain. Anonymous. Resilient. Scrappy. Small. Easily and often overlooked. But they can fly, too, same as any eagle.

Watching birds reminds Steve of the days before he knew Bucky, when he would go up to the roof alone to draw the pigeons his neighbor kept in coops.

Iridescent feathers in every pattern you could imagine. Red eyes. Bodies sleek and plump. Heads bobbing. Voices soft and trilling.

When his neighbor died, Steve went up to open the cages, but found the doors already ajar.

He kept feeding the pigeons, but one by one they left to seek their own shelter. He would see them nearby every now and again, perched atop the coops or on the roof ledge, but never inside on their perches. Their home had been with Mr. Ellison, and he'd left them all behind.

It wasn't until years later that Steve realized his neighbor's death had been a suicide. That the man had kept enough love in his heart to save his birds, but hadn't had enough left over to save himself.

Still, it's important to know when to let a thing go. To know what's yours, and what you have no right to claim. Steve grudgingly accepts that ugly things can be done gracefully.

When Steve heads up to bed that night, he stops in Bucky's door, knocking on the frame until Bucky swivels in his chair and raises his eyebrows slightly in encouragement, or perhaps acquiescence.

Steve takes a careful breath and looks his friend in the eyes.

“I just... wanted to apologize,” Steve says, and Bucky stares. “I've been stepping on your toes all this time, trying to get my past back and pinning you to yours in the process... and I just... I'm sorry. I'll try to stay out of your hair.”

Bucky's nostrils flare and he nods once before he turns back toward the monitors.

He pores over the landscape and satellite photos that Hill sent him and picks out the positions most likely to harbor snipers, marking the points with tiny crosses.

Steve sets up a table saw in the barn. He cuts sheets of masonite into matching squares, gessoes both sides to keep them from warping, and then paints the view out the back window. He does one every day, brushes gliding over the panel and leaving silky trails of oil paint. The lower third is always land and the upper two thirds are for the sky. He doesn't do it at the same time every day, so the paintings are wildly different. Lavender dawns. Grey storms. Cobalt afternoons. Red nights. Deep shadows and the sharp line of the trees. Grey mist and the horizon lost.

He writes the dates and times on the backs and builds a rack so that they can dry safely.

He feels like the last man on earth.

An endling.

He thinks of Hamlet.

… I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space...

He decides to seek the infinite in the nutshell.

He gets a microscope.

Looks at drops of water from the lake in the park and sees the tiny things wiggling within.

Seeks out the diatoms that live in the water and the earth and fills sketchbooks with their strange crystalline shapes.

He learns the secrets of feathers, zippered together with tiny barbs and teeth.

Pricks his finger to see the cells of his own blood.

Plucks a strand of hair to see the smooth scales of the cuticle.

Plucks an eyelash to find the tiny mites that make it their home.

Gets a telescope and paints portraits of the moon in all her crescents and colors.

Buys field guides and learns the names of the flowers, bugs, and birds that share his home. He paints the creatures in careful watercolors and presses the warped sheets of paper between boards.

He learns the habits of rabbits and deer.

Plants native flowers to help struggling species.

Makes sure there's milkweed for the monarchs.

He sinks cattle troughs into the ground to make a cluster of ponds shaped like a four-leafed clover. Steve stocks the little pools with goldfish - the cheap bags of a dozen tiny orange sacrifices that you're meant to feed to bigger fish. Steve is using them to keep the mosquito larvae under control. It has the side effect of attracting herons and kingfishers. So Steve gets water lettuce and lily pads for the fish to hide beneath so that they'll stand a chance of surviving. A week later, he's out feeding the fish and he's shocked to find frogs resting on the lips of the pools, as though they fell there from the sky. He knows they had to have made the march from the lake. Hopped half a mile on those shiny little legs. He wants to kiss them for their trouble.

Toads come, too, and when the tadpoles finally devour their tails and leave the water, Steve notices that the toadlets have gold eyes. He orders some gold leaf and uses it in the watercolors he paints of the amphibians.

He has good luck with his garden the second time around, now that he knows what not to do. Everything tastes good. The rabbits and deer seem to agree; they steal roughly half of his greens.

He gets caught up on art history, and, by extension, caught up on social movements and politics.

He becomes obsessed with Francis Bacon's paintings.

He installs a flagpole in the front yard and flies The American flag and the equality flag.

If he gets pissed off or starts to wallow in self pity, he has his own equivalent of a swear-jar: he makes donations to Planned Parenthood, or HRC, or democrats running for reelection in rural areas. He has seventy years worth of back pay from the army to live on. S.H.I.E.L.D. paid generously, but their money feels dirty to Steve – it's Hydra's money in his book, so he likes spending it on causes of which they would likely have disapproved.

Steve is grateful for his life. Bucky is safe, alive, and working a job that lets him feel useful. They're under the same roof. They're healthy, given their ages and circumstances. They're not making the world worse, to the best of their knowledge. They're seeing things they never dreamed of on a daily basis, even if it's filtered through their computer screens.

In July, Stark gets sloppy, which is not the same as careless, but the end result is identical. He unveils his new AI – Ultron – an iteration of the Iron Man suit that's meant to fill in for the avengers and save human lives. And the AI follows his instructions, but the instructions are imprecise: the objective is to defend the earth, which means the goal is the planet's salvation as a whole; not humanity's. JARVIS is under operational orders more akin to the hippocratic oath.

For fuck's sake, Stark, if it ain't broke... Steve thinks.

The outcome is slaughter.

Steve suits up.

“Where are you going?” Bucky asks, and Steve startles.

Bucky rarely initiates conversation, and he never makes a sound as he moves through the house.

“You've been watching the news,” Steve says, huffing a surprised laugh. “New York.”

“But you're supposed to be keeping a low profile.”

Steve snorts - nearly giggles - at that.

“Hill called me in,” Steve sighs. “It'll be fine. No one's gonna be able to get to me in the middle of this mess.”

“Are you hearing yourself?” Bucky boggles. “Jesus, Steve, you're gonna get yourself killed.”

Steve's brow twists at this outburst of familiar anger from his favorite face.

“If I don't go, I might get everyone killed,” Steve says, staring at the pinched frown that's still crushing Bucky's lips. “I don't want to let my team down.”

Steve takes a slow breath and lets his shoulders sag. He's tired of leaving regrets in his wake. He takes the three steps that separate him from Bucky, tugs the bewildered body into his arms, and sets a kiss on a too-pale temple.

“If we can't beat this thing,” Steve says, and shakes his head. “You run, Buck, and you hide – somewhere no one and nothing can find you - and you never look back.”

“Steve-” Bucky starts, but there's a thudding sound outside and the whole house shakes.

Steve offers a tight smile. Bucky knows an apology when he sees one.

“You're a punk,” Steve breathes, and squeezes Bucky's shoulders.

When Bucky gets down to the front door, it's just in time to see Thor loop his arm around Steve's waist before launching them both up into the sky on the tail of his hammer.

He's never seen Thor before. Thor was on his hit-list - with an indefinite expiration date, as there was no telling when the god would be on earth and whether the Soldier would be awake for it.

Bucky is relieved to find he has no urge to kill the Asgardian, but he's disturbed that Thor is dragging Steve toward danger instead of awayfrom it. He thinks a thousand years of life should yield better sense than that.

He sprints back into the house and up to his room where he opens a dozen new news channels in separate windows and watches them all at once on two monitors.

Banner is the only one near Ultron. The rest of the avengers are at the other end of Manhattan trying to stop the allies Ultron made for himself. It's been this way for over an hour. The machine can't really hurt Banner, but Bruce can't prevent Ultron from doing damage to everything around them.

It's five minutes before Steve and Thor arrive. They work as a unit. Or try to. Banner attempts to hold Ultron still while Thor wields his hammer and Steve braces his shield to make an anvil. They're hoping to smash their foe between them. They succeed in destroying its right arm and Banner is shifting his grip to let them get a clear swing at the head when the machine sacrifices its legs in order to escape. The limbs explode in a starburst of shrapnel. Thor and Banner turn their heads to protect their eyes, but Steve is still only human, and he's using his shield as a weapon, which leaves him defenseless.

The smaller bits of metal bounce off of him, deflected by his suit, but a large one pierces his flank and pins him to a piece of debris that's standing behind him.

Thor rushes over to help get him free, smashing the rubble with his hammer to release Steve from the concrete while wisely leaving the shrapnel in place within Steve's body - both of them know that to remove it would only mean more blood loss.

And then Steve waves Thor off after Ultron and the camera follows the god.

Bucky opens a new tab and hunts for a shot of Steve, but all the cell phone cameras are trained on Thor.

Ultron opts to fly high enough that Banner can't reach him by leaping. Thor has to pursue the machine alone.

Nothing on Thor has circuits, so there's nothing for Ultron to manipulate.

The sky darkens and clouds begin to swirl and converge, spinning faster until there's a blurred column at their center: a tornado, spinning the god and the machine.

Damaged buildings collapse when Thor pulls the trigger on his vortex and slams Ultron into the ground. Eight of the camera feeds Bucky is following go dark.

When the dust settles, Bucky can see that Thor has Ultron pinned beneath Mjolnir.

And still Stark's machine is not dead.

Even the grainy cell phone footage tells Bucky as much. And Thor has to leave his hammer in place if he wants to keep the upper hand. He's forced to try to rip his enemy apart with his hands and he wastes no time in doing so. Banner comes around a corner and follows suit.

Now the machine is desperate, pulling in energy from its surroundings and blasting its assailants back with massive pulses of plasma. No sooner have Thor and Bruce laid hands on the thing than it's hurling them back. Thor calls the wind to their backs to help brace them, but it comes with the side effect of increasing the intensity of the impact of Ultron's plasma assaults.

There's still no sign of Steve. Bucky is scanning the screens, but to no avail.

Instead, he sees a green blur hurtle to the ground, sending rubble skittering down into the crater. Then a pale man with glossy black curls approaches the machine.

Bucky has seen his file.

The god looks older.

Wilder.

Harder.

He has a gold spear in his right hand, a glowing blue cube in his left, and a perverse expression on his face. He says something to Thor with a smile like a knife and the eyes of a doe. Flirtation or threat, Bucky isn't sure. None of the feeds have decent sound. Perhaps it's both.

Thor's face is torn between horror and hope. Either way, it looks like heartbreak and offers Bucky no answers.

The god of mischief sneers and raises the cube.

All the feeds go black.

  
  


3  Woodstock

 

After a moment, Bucky realizes that the power is out at the house. He grabs his cell phone and hunts for more distant news feeds. He finds that all stations out of New York are dark, but those in Boston and DC are still broadcasting, though they don't know what's going on as they can't get any new footage from the scene.

Three minutes later there's another deep booming noise and the house shakes. Bucky hears voices drawing near.

“I can walk,” Steve says.

“That doesn't mean you should,” Thor answers, carrying Steve through the front door and setting him on his right side on the dining room table.

Bucky is standing at the top of the stairs, wondering whether it might have been unwise to divest himself of his left arm. And all of his guns.

“I could be helping the many,” Loki sighs, sauntering in behind his brother. “Yet you would have me help this one.”

“Without this one there would be no many.”

Loki is carrying Steve's shield, peering closely at it, sniffing it, and going so far as to try pinching it between his teeth behind Thor's back. He makes a face that indicates that he's impressed, then sets the shield down on the couch before following Thor into the dining room.

Bucky descends the stairs in perfect silence. When he peeks around the corner, he finds a golden image of Steve floating in the air a foot above his actual body.

“It's a soul forge, Barnes,” Loki sighs, not turning around, and Bucky isn't sure how Loki even knew he was in the room.

The gods study the ghost-image of Steve's body, peering and prodding at the point that was speared by the shrapnel. It's still embedded in Steve's side, visible even in the shimmering soul forge. Loki tips the image of Steve onto its front. Loki's shoulders relax and Thor thanks the norns.

“It's a flesh wound,” Loki huffs. “You two might be onto something with all your bulk: a greater percentage of you is safe for piercing.”

Loki uses the Tesseract to remove Steve's suit and dissolve the shrapnel without having to touch them.

Blood bubbles out of the wound and slides down Steve's skin, belting his waist with red.

Bucky checks Thor's face, but it's still calm.

Loki settles his palms over the wounds in Steve's flank and Bucky sees a faint green glow peeking out between pale fingers.

The god speaks words that Bucky doesn't recognize. A language that's almost familiar, but just not quite.

Steve hums.

“You okay?” Bucky asks, and his voice is shaking.

“Yeah,” Steve nods. “It's just... I can feel it inside, all the way through. It's warm... and it tickles.”

Thor's smile gets wider and Bucky's stomach stops turning over.

When Loki is done, Steve lies still and Thor scoops him off the table with arms that Bucky would envy regardless of whether he had one or two.

“What's the matter, Captain? Getting sleepy?” Thor teases.

“I'm fine,” Steve protests, but he's smiling and making no effort to remove himself from Thor's arms.

“Let's keep it that way,” Thor says. “Where's the bath?”

“Second floor,” Steve answers, jerking his head in the corresponding direction.

Thor starts carrying Steve upstairs.

Bucky hears Loki huff. He turns his head just in time to catch Loki rolling his eyes.

“Thor,” Loki calls. “As much as I hate to interrupt the fun you're planning, we still have work to do. More of your precious mortals are still pinned beneath debris, brother mine, remember?”

Thor disappears into the bathroom and sets Steve on the toilet lid, then reappears in the doorway, scowling.

“Will you help him?” Thor asks, looking down at Bucky.

“Yes,” Bucky says, and Thor stares for another moment, but then nods, satisfied, before turning back to Steve.

“Soak in the bath and then sleep for a day at least,” Thor says. “And, after that, eat as much as you can manage.”

“Nothing strenuous for a week,” Loki calls. “Just lie about and let your friend tend to you.”

The way Loki pronounces friend sticks in Bucky's ear, but he gives no outward indication that he caught the implication of the god's tone.

Bucky watches until the gods are gone, then hurries upstairs to fill the bath.

Steve is still perched atop the toilet seat, peering at the pink lines in his side where the shrapnel pierced him and pressing them experimentally.

“Leave those alone,” Bucky scolds, gently, and then turns on the tap to let the water heat up before he closes the drain.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “You don't have to do this. I can get it.”

“You didn't object to Thor doing it,” Bucky notes.

“Well, I'm not made of stone,” Steve says, staring at his knees and wearing a lopsided grin.

“They both said I should look after you.”

“Okay. Just don't let me get in your way.”

Bucky offers Steve his arm and helps to bear up some of his weight as Steve climbs into the tub and sinks into the water.

“Thanks,” Steve sighs, with a smile that's slightly sleepy.

“Happy Birthday,” Bucky says, and Steve shakes with laughter and then sighs.

“I forgot,” Steve admits. “Gets hard to keep track of time out here.”

Bucky nods.

They listen to the dripping of the tap until it dries out. After that, all they can hear is Steve's breathing as it bounces off the surface of the water and echoes from the porcelain of the bath.

It's late afternoon and the sun is coming in the small bathroom window, staining the white room a soft orange.

Bucky drains out some cold water and adds more hot after the first hour.

By the second hour, it's starting to get dark outside, so Bucky gives the light switch an experimental flip and is pleased to find that the power is back on. He replenishes Steve's hot water again, grateful that the heater is powered by gas instead of electricity.

“I think I'm gonna fall asleep,” Steve admits, after another half hour of soaking, and Bucky nods and grabs the soap.

He scrubs Steve's back, shins, calves, and feet and leaves the rest for Steve. When that's done, he pulls the plug and helps Steve stand so that he can rinse himself under the shower head. They leave the curtain slightly ajar so that Bucky can still reach inside to grip Steve under the armpit so there's no risk of him falling. He helps Steve climb out and then drapes him in towels before dropping to his knees to dry Steve's feet.

Bucky's hair is down past his shoulders and hides his face when he's at this angle. He hasn't cut it once since he came back. He lives in dark grey A-shirts and plain black pants. He only began taking showers - instead of silent baths in the dark – in November. Steve only catches Bucky sleeping in the morning about half the time. The other half of the time, he's already up at his desk, working.

When Bucky herds Steve into his room and pulls the sheets up over him, it feels backward. Steve is pretty certain he should be tucking Bucky into bed, not the other way around. He's not sure why.

“Thanks again,” Steve says, and then goes still when Bucky leans down toward him.

He sets his cheek to Steve's forehead the way he did nearly eighty years ago - to check Steve's temperature whenever Steve looked like shit but claimed to feel fine.

“Do I look that bad?” Steve asks, and his eyes are as wet as his smile is fond.

“Pale and tired,” Bucky says, nodding and starting to straighten.

Steve catches him by the back of the neck.

“Must be like looking in a mirror,” Steve murmurs, and tugs Bucky's forehead down against his own cheek.

He can feel Bucky's fingers alighting on his neck, searching for his pulse and then counting the beats.

Steve is listening to Bucky's breathing: to the way it caught when his fingers first curled around his neck and then shuddered out of him when their faces met.

He squeezes the back of Bucky's neck and brushes the skin behind the left ear with his thumb for almost a minute. Then he turns his head to kiss Bucky's temple again - to stamp out his earlier goodbye with hello.

“Get some sleep, Buck,” Steve breathes.

In the morning, Steve's bed is empty, and Bucky swears in six languages as his heart starts to sprint in his chest. He runs downstairs and finds nothing out of order: no signs of a struggle or an accident.

From the kitchen window, he can see that the barn door is open.

When Bucky gets out there, Steve is jumping rope and singing along to Oh Bondage, Up Yours, belting out the words in time with the beats of his feet.

Bucky turns off the stereo and Steve groans and goes still.

“Is this your idea of taking it easy?” Bucky asks.

“I feel fine.”

“Now, maybe, but how are you gonna feel tomorrow?”

“I'm all healed up-”

“You're not visibly bleeding, but that's not the same thing. Two guys who've got two thousand years between them told you to rest for a week, but you think you know better, huh?”

Steve opens his mouth to protest but Bucky is walking toward him with his jaw set and then yanking the jump rope out of Steve's hands and tossing it across the barn before shutting off the lights.

“You're supposed to be asleep and then you're supposed to be eating, and this ain't either.”

Steve is still staring and slightly gaping.

“Get back in bed,” Bucky says, waving his arm like he's shooing a cat away. “What's the matter with you?”

Steve walks toward the house, smiling at the sound of the feet brushing through the grass behind him. The sound shifts when they reach the wooden planks of the porch and the parquet of the living room. It alters again as they ascend the stairs, but the weight of the footsteps is always the same. Familiar. Someone's watching Steve's back.

Steve keeps smiling.

Steve kicks off his clothes and flops back down in his bed. Bucky brings him water and then brings his laptop in and sits up beside Steve to work and make sure Steve doesn't sneak off again.

Bucky notices that Steve's hair is longer at the top. He's wearing it the way he did when they were in Europe. Parted on the right and swept to the side, soft and golden, and Bucky's fingers itch to smooth the silky blond wave whenever it gets mussed by the blankets.

Throughout the afternoon, Bucky looks down from his work to set his eyes on a familiar sight: with the blankets hiding his body and just his head poking out, Steve looks little. His face is slack in his sleep. His jaw sags back toward his neck in a way that makes his features look much as they did in the thirties.

Bucky half wishes that he could push down the blankets and find his best friend small again. He wants to apologize to the man Steve was. Bucky has long been angry with himself for letting that tiny blond body go unloved for all those years. Untouched. He missed his chance. There's no going back.

At the same time, he's glad at Steve's health, and his guilt makes him feel selfish – he should only want Steve to be strong. He wonders if maybe he was being selfish back then, too. Stingy with his love. Cowardly.

In those days, Bucky told himself it was for the best. For their own good. Steve got himself into enough trouble as it was. He didn't need Bucky inviting him to court more.

And there was always the chance Bucky was wrong. That Steve wasn't as queer as the day was long, and that confessing to him could have killed something between them. Upset the balance. Too much love on one side and not enough to sustain it on the other. It could have thrown their orbits out of sync and sent them drifting apart forever.

Too dangerous.

Then Bucky went to war and learned what danger really was. Imbalance. Hell.

Now the flaws on Steve's body are those that Bucky put there; bullet wounds always heal badly.

But Steve's eyes are the same as ever. His lips, too: full and pink and opinionated, begging for a fat lip. Or a kiss.

In the middle of the night, Steve curls up on his right side and presses his forehead against Bucky's left hip. It's a good fit. Bucky doesn't have an elbow there to get in the way and the added warmth is welcome in the chilly hours before dawn.

Steve wakes up at noon when Bucky sets a plate piled with eggs and sausage down in front of him.

He says thanks, blinks the sleep from his eyes, sits up, and sets to work.

“What did you have for breakfast?” Steve asks, pausing halfway through his eggs.

“Nothing yet,” Bucky says, and Steve frowns.

“Is there anything left in the pan?”

“No.”

Steve huffs and holds the plate out to Bucky, who hesitates. But Steve won't back down. He raises an eyebrow at Bucky until he finally gives in: he sits on the edge of the bed so that he can set the dish on his lap and eat with one hand.

“How's your side?” Bucky asks.

“Feels fine. Maybe a little tight.”

“You should keep sleeping,” Bucky says.

“I need to water the vegetables.”

“You can supervise.”

Steve gives Bucky a lesson in gardening and then Bucky insists that Steve really does have to rest.

Steve opts to lie down on the grass and read beside the ponds. Bucky brings his laptop along again and works by Steve's side until the battery dies, then heads inside to fix dinner. Broiled steaks, green beans, salad, and baked potatoes. They eat sitting cross-legged on the lawn.

“Am I imagining things, or does food taste better?” Bucky asks, staring at the steak speared on the end of his fork.

“It does taste better. Doesn't hurt that we can finally afford decent cuts of meat. Don't have to bulk everything up with breadcrumbs anymore, or cook it all day just to make it soft enough to chew.”

“I missed chewing,” Bucky admits. “They used to give me these awful liquid meals before a mission – meat, vegetables, you name it, everything mixed together and turned into mush. Made it so eating just felt like another dirty job.”

“They didn't cut your hair, either,” Steve says, softly, and Bucky nods.

“I shaved my face with my knives. Didn't mind the hair as much.”

They lie on their backs and watch the sky change colors as the sun sinks behind the trees. Pale blues give way to oranges, pinks, and purples. Then everything is blue again, but darker now, and Venus comes peeking through.

“How come you've been avoiding me all this time?” Steve asks, dropping his head to his side to stare at Bucky's profile. “Do I upset you?”

“No,” Bucky huffs, and his laugh is wet and broken. “It was never you. I've been trying to keep you clean, so you can get back to your life when Hill gives you the green light. I don't want to drag you down with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Guilt by association. Chrissake, Steve, I'm a killer.”

“You were a soldier,” Steve corrects. “Can't win a war just by knocking the other guy down. You have to take him out, or he'll get back up and kill you.” Steve shakes his head. “War wasn't like watching you win fights in Brooklyn back alleys. I was so naïve it makes me sick."

“You weren't the only one. And there are worse things to be than naïve,” Bucky says.

“You weren't a free man, Buck. There's no shame in surviving.”

“I've still got all those memories,” Bucky says, shaking his head.

“They're in the past,” Steve soothes.

“So is the rest of me.”

“You're right here, right now, same as me.”

“I ain't who I was.”

“No one is,” Steve sighs. “But we weren't then, either. We were always someone new every day. Everyone is. That's how life works. Everything that happens to us changes us - that's growth. But we didn't start from scratch every day back then. We built on yesterday. This doesn't have to be any different.”

Bucky hums. So many of his yesterdays don't bear remembering.

But plenty of them do.

“You wanna go skinny dipping?” Bucky says, and Steve is up almost instantly and heading into the house to grab towels. “You gotta take it easy, though,” Bucky calls. “Your insides are still stitching themselves back together.”

“I mostly just float on my back,” Steve admits.

The moon is bright enough that they can see the deer out in the fields as they walk toward the park.

Bucky wants to kick himself when he sees the lake. Wreathed in willows and reflecting the stars. He should have said yes the first time Steve asked him along.

They dump their clothes on the bank and wade out into the water, feeling the soft brush of seaweed against their ankles and then the heavier drag of lily pad stalks along their thighs. When the water reaches their chins, they push off with their toes and take flight, slowly swirling their limbs, moving forward at a lazy pace.

“I was a little worried that I was gonna be stuck swimming in circles,” Bucky jokes, and Steve starts laughing.

“You're terrible,” Steve scolds, but he's still giggling.

They stare up at the milky way. It always makes Steve think of salmon spawning – clouds of semen dispersing in a stream and settling on roe. Granting unpredictable lives to fragile naked beings.

They float for an hour before Steve gives a frustrated grunt.

“The cold's starting to make my side ache,” Steve sighs.

“Hot bath,” Bucky prescribes.

Bucky has a hot water bottle waiting in Steve's bed when Steve gets out of the tub. Steve tucks it against his side and falls asleep smiling.

In the morning, Steve convinces Bucky that he feels well enough to cook for himself. Afterward, Bucky still has to talk him out of jogging and jumping rope. Steve haggles his way into a long, supervised walk.

They do a slow loop along their property line, keeping an eye out for neighbors and hikers in the park.

The breeze is warm and most of the wildflowers are blooming. Butterflies are dipping and bobbing through the air and coasting on the breeze. Everything smells fresh and green.

They stick to the path that Steve made last year with all his running. They can see the tracks of deer and raccoons in the dirt.

“I always wanted to take you some place like this,” Bucky says, waving his arm and gesturing at everything around them. “To live, I mean. So's you could breathe some decent air with those lungs of yours. Not have the neighbors wakin' you up at all hours with their fights. Not have all the filth on your boots and the hems of your pants. Not hear cars honkin' at four am when you had to go to work in two hours.”

“Seems like your prayers were answered,” Steve says, and pats Bucky on the back.

“You're the only one who's ever answered any of my prayers, pally,” Bucky says, shaking his head.

Steve still believes in God. Bucky is relieved. Glad that Steve hasn't changed. Hasn't lost his brightness; his hope, optimism, and kindness.

Bucky is also baffled.

And furious.

For Bucky, it always seemed as though God gathered the souls of Hercules, all the saints, and Jesus Christ and poured them into Steve.

But God was always such a cunt. He broke every bit of Steve's body He could spare without killing the kid outright. Probably laughed and clapped Himself on the back about it for a decade straight.

God gave Steve an iron will, and a glass fist to wield it.

When God died, Bucky left Him in the street to rot like the fucking rat He was.

Erskine gave Steve the body he deserved. A heart that could beat. Lungs that could breathe. Legs that could run.

Bucky saved the doctor's picture from the file he stole on Steve.

Saved the photos of Steve, too. Before and after. Because Steve was perfect before; science merely made him safer.

And Bucky is grateful for that. He doesn't want his best friend to be sick. Or dying. Ever.

And that is what love is. Not anniversaries or chocolate or kisses or wedding cake, but painless immortality for the other half of your soul.

And you want souls.

You even want your black-hearted nightmare of a god to be real again, because some folks deserve heaven and your friend is first on that list.

“They put people in ovens, Steve,” Bucky says. “Where the fuck was God then?”

“Gone,” Steve barks, eyes shining.

And Bucky doesn't understand.

Steve starts walking faster, but then curses and veers off to sit on the crumbling remains of an old stone fence. He's always hated fighting with Bucky. Even if he wins, it feels like he's losing everything.

He stares down at his feet while his face goes hot and his throat gets tight.

“I can't believe in God,” Bucky breathes, sitting down next to him so that their shoulders are butted up against each other. “Not after everything I've seen... everything I've done.”

“I know,” Steve nods, and Bucky sees tears sliding down his cheeks.

“We call it mythology if it's coming from any other part of the world. What makes Christians so special?”

“I'm not an idiot, Buck,” Steve huffs. “I don't think the earth is a few thousand years old. I believe in the big bang. Science is the reason I'm breathing.

“I know it, Steve. So why the fairy tale?”

“I don't need the fairy tale. It's the theme: love your neighbor,” Steve says. “That's what God is. It's not some vague thing out there,” Steve gestures at the sky. “Not an old man that hates women and sex and atheists. It's just another name for love. You leave love behind, you let go of your humanity. Someone starves you of love, they damage your humanity. Take the best of you. Rip the soul right out of the world.”

Bucky nods.

“You think we're just stardust?” Steve asks.

“Not just. I think we're stardust, and I think that's a hell of a thing to be,” Bucky says.

He stares at Steve's profile and tries to will the stubborn man to turn, but Steve is staring straight ahead to shield himself from Bucky's gaze. Bucky frowns and catches the tears that are caught at the edges of Steve's jaw, then rubs them between his fingertips and stares at the wet tracks they leave on his skin.

“Sometimes I think maybe our dust came from the same star,” Bucky murmurs. “That it's spent a few billion years trying to put itself back together, and we keep getting in its way.”

Steve's nostrils flare at this, but he keeps looking out at the fields. Bucky takes a shaky breath, stands, and starts walking.

“What else do you believe in?” Steve asks, and Bucky stops, turns, and tips his head to the side. He's smiling.

“You, punk, same as always.”

And now Steve is crying again. It makes Bucky's chest feel too tight. But then he sees that Steve is smiling, too, and he breathes a little easier.

Bucky still remembers bits and pieces of the Bible.

Love your neighbor...

“Supposed to love yourself, too, you know?” Bucky says, and Steve looks at him with a question on his face. “How come you don't draw yourself anymore?” Bucky asks, softly.

“I don't look like myself anymore,” Steve shrugs, and goes back to staring at his feet – four sizes bigger than they used to be. He doesn't know why he's never tripped over them. “It takes me forever to pick myself out of a photo now 'cause I'm still looking for the shortest guy in it.”

“You should be looking for the guy with the biggest mouth,” Bucky says, coming close enough to nudge the sole of Steve's left foot with the toe of his shoe.

“Still can't figure out what you saw in me,” Steve admits. “You were the only person who ever really picked me – who didn't just want to make me into something else. Took me as I was - a cocky asthmatic with a heart defect and a chip on his shoulder like the grand canyon. You've got lousy taste, Barnes.”

“Yeah, well, we've got that in common.”

When they get back to the house, they eat again. Afterward, Steve goes up to his studio to grab a sketchbook and pencil, intending to do some quick studies of the blooms on the waterlilies out back. He flips through the pages, seeking the place he left off, then gets curious. He leans in Bucky's door.

“So, you've been peeking at my drawings, huh?” Steve says.

“Yep,” Bucky says, not looking up from his laptop.

“Snoop.”

“Yep,” Bucky agrees.

“You don't sound too sorry.”

“Someone's gotta keep an eye on you.”

“That what you call it?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“So, am I getting better, or worse?”

“Both,” Bucky answers. “The drawings are getting better, but your mind is getting worse.”

“Oh?”

“It's just nudes, nudes, nudes. Got a bad case of gutter-brain, Rogers. Gonna spoil that clean-cut image.”

“I'm learning anatomy.”

“Sure,” Bucky drawls, and Steve laughs and starts back down the hall. “I liked what you did with my arm,” Bucky says, and Steve stops.

Steve thinks Bucky's left arm looks like a clipped wing. Proof of the angel hidden in his guardian. That the scars are the holes left behind when the feathers were ripped away. So Steve drew Bucky with a wing where the limb used to be. He had been drawing a lot of birds, so it was easy for him to blend their bodies into Bucky's.

“Hang onto that one, will ya?” Bucky asks. “I'm saving up to buy it off you.”

Steve turns to look at Bucky's face and Bucky gives him a small smile. It looks like gratitude.

Steve nods.

4 Home

 

Bucky keeps checking in on Steve's sketchbooks, but no self portraits appear inside them. Then Bucky realizes he's still expecting that the drawings will look like Steve at age nineteen, and he understands a little better why Steve doesn't do them.

But the most essential part of Steve has stayed the same. Steve still has a daydreamer's eyes. Downcast and focused somewhere within. Bucky wishes he knew how to draw them himself. And he wonders what Steve is wishing for. Escaping to. Or running from.

“Did you dream when you were in the ice?” Bucky asks, in early August as they sit at the table eating sundaes after dinner.

“No,” Steve says, shaking his head. “At least, not that I remember. I crashed that plane in the ocean and woke up in New York. Did youdream?”

Bucky shakes his head no.

“Do you remember much from before?” Steve asks, softly.

He's been afraid to ask, because he's afraid to hear the answer.

Bucky nods and Steve's stomach floods with butterflies.

“I don't know that they ever really erased anything,” Bucky says. “They used some hypnotism, but that's at least half hooey. I don't think they wiped my mind so much as conditioned it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chair wasn't anything special,” Bucky shrugs.

Steve has seen the chair. That was in the file.

“It was just an electric chair,” Bucky continues. “If the chair wasn't handy, they'd use something else, dressed up to look medical.”

Its the “just” that does it.

Steve's shoulders are curled in and quaking and tears are streaming down his cheeks. He has his hand over his mouth to cover it because he can't stop gaping. Polite, in the face of anything. And Steve is nodding his head, offering encouragement and trying not to interrupt.

Bucky's face crumples at Steve's good manners, but he pushes on.

“They'd ask me to remember the past, and then they'd shock me. They said it was all a fictitious identity that had been drilled into me by theenemy. Told me it'd get me killed. Asked me about everything that ever made me happy and punished me for every memory. I learned pretty quick that the past equaled pain. I stopped looking back.”

“Does it still hurt you to remember?” Steve asks, as a wave of guilt and horror washes over him.

“No. I still expect it to hurt. But I ain't strapped in a chair no more. And they ain't even breathin'.”

Hydra tortured Bucky and fed him lies. Paved over his past. Ordered him into atrocities. Made his life a nightmare.

Steve resolves to turn all that on its head. He's good at that, after all - he uses a defensive weapon for offensive actions.

So he'll give Bucky pleasure and tell him the truth. Fill his future. Lead him into healing and make his days a dream for as long as Bucky will let him.

Steve begins with the basics.

Heat and shelter are covered.

Health is coming along – Bucky swims and runs with Steve, now. The running always turns into racing. Bucky is ever so slightly out of shape from spending over a year parked at a desk, but he's catching up fast and determined to surpass Steve. Swimming is as close as either of them comes to meditating, but it helps their minds. They stare up at all the stars as they float on their backs. With their ears underwater, all they hear is their own breathing. It reminds them that they are tiny and alive.

Food comes to the fore.

Cooking is easy when you stick to the recipe, and Steve is good at following directions when he wants to be.

He all but buries Bucky in elaborate meals.

At the end of summer, he does a rack of slow-cooked pork ribs that all but fall from the bone. Usually Steve removes the bones from the dishes they eat; it's a big enough pain in the ass to do it with two hands, and doing it with one would take all night. But they're not using silverware for this – the sides are corn on the cob and sweet potato fries - so he doesn't bother.

The meal lets Bucky get his fingers into his food and paints his lips a sticky burgundy with barbeque sauce. Steve smiles and gets up to grab bobby pins from the coffee table - Bucky keeps them there so he'll have them when wants his hair off of his face if he's reading. Steve steps on stray bobby pins all the time now. They slip out of Bucky's hair and onto the floor at every opportunity. It reminds Steve of his mother - the same thing would happen when he lived with her. It makes the house feel like home.

Steve pins back the strands that that keep threatening to sway through Bucky's food and then sits down again.

Bucky is smiling now.

Steve makes a mental note that Bucky likes having his hair fixed and eating messy food.

Bucky also likes dessert. A lot. That was something they rarely had before the war. Too frivolous. Steve never had the opportunity to learn that his best friend had a serious sweet tooth. Now Steve makes huge batches of cookie dough and keeps them in the freezer. He thaws them and bakes a dozen after dinner so they're fresh and soft and doomed.

Bucky invents his own recipes on occasion. Combining the things he favors. He likes to fry an egg and put it in the middle of his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The first time he does it, Steve looks at him like he's sprouted a second head, so Bucky makes him take a bite. From then on, Steve puts a fried egg in the middle of his PB&J, too.

Much of what makes Bucky happy is more absence than presence, but Steve can still provide it.

Bucky likes it quiet in the evenings. It lets him fill his head with fresh thoughts of his own, which is still novel and exhilarating. It also lets him converse with Steve even if they're at opposite ends of the house.

He loves the hazy light of day and likes the nights to be dark. Steve can read on his iPad without having to turn the lights on, so that's fine by him. They can both see pretty well in the darkness these days anyway.

Bucky likes to be naked, and Steve doesn't have to do anything to make Bucky happy there, so that's easy enough. Steve feels strangely honored that Bucky doesn't hide his body from him. It's a relief to know that Bucky feels safe and comfortable being so exposed under this roof.

Bucky likes to be warm - likes it if they sit on the couch together with one blanket draped over both of them, wrapping them in the shared heat of their skin.

Steve hates knitted afghans. They make him think of rough cheap sheets and itchy wool army uniforms. He wants his world to be soft, if he can help it, so he gets a king sized down comforter with a silky duvet to keep on the couch. In the evenings, Steve sits at one end reading while Bucky puts his feet in Steve's lap or wedges his toes under Steve's thigh and props his head up on a pillow at the other end. They cocoon themselves in the enormous blanket and inadvertently read themselves to sleep.

If Bucky is clothed, he likes very soft fabrics in pale colors and loose cuts. It makes him look like he should be on a beach being photographed to advertise cologne. Instead, he looks artfully rumpled in Steve's watercolors, where he wades through the wildflowers that Steve planted everywhere for the birds and butterflies.

Steve gets good at drawing fabric, which had always been a weak point in his artistic skill set, but now he finds himself drawn to the subject. His eyes seek the soft folds and gathers of jersey and linen that wrap around Bucky's body. He sketches the puffy lumps and overstuffed corners of the comforter on the couch with Bucky's hair spilling from one end and his toes peeking out the other. He draws Bucky's bath towel, working hard to catch the tension in the fabric where it's wrapped around a slim waist and tucked in over the left hip. Steve likes it even better when the towel is slowly slipping down Bucky's hips as he brushes his teeth after a shower. On those days, Steve forgets the fabric and focuses on the dimples at the base of Bucky's back, shiny with steam and bedecked with drops of water.

Steve gets an email from Hill, wanting to know What's going on with Barnes?  Wondering why his productivity has been cut in half. Is there an issue? Do you need backup?

Steve tells her that Bucky was busy taking care of him after the Ultron incident – I'm fine, by the way. And that, since then, he's been busy taking care of Bucky. That Bucky is working eight hour days now instead of sixteen, and that's as it should be. That he's not working weekends. That Bucky's nightmares are nearly gone. That Bucky is eating, sleeping, reading, swimming, and running. That he makes jokes and laughs at them. That if she says a word to Bucky about his analytical output, he will sever her access to Bucky entirely and they'll both become farmers. Have a nice day.

At midnight, Steve and Bucky are both upstairs, taking turns in the shower. Steve is still brushing his teeth when Bucky steps out of the tub. Bucky can see Steve staring at what's left of his arm in the mirror.

“Does it upset you to see it?” Bucky asks.

Steve shakes his head no and rinses his mouth.

“I shoulda jumped off of that train after you,” Steve says, staring down the drain.

“You shoulda jumped out of that plane,” Bucky amends.

Steve's face drops and he looks more ashamed than Bucky can ever remember seeing him.

“Sorry,” Steve breathes, but Bucky shakes his head.

“I've been there,” Bucky soothes, and drapes his towel around his neck to catch the water from his hair while he rubs the space between Steve's shoulder blades and squeezes the back of his neck. “Sometimes all you can think about is how to make it stop.”

Steve takes a deep shuddering breath and nods.

Two nights later, Steve can hear soft cries coming from Bucky's room and he holds his breath. It's been months since Bucky's had a bad dream. Steve doesn't know whether to wake his friend up or let him sleep through it and hope he forgets the nightmare by morning. Then he can hear the sheets rustling. Eventually the bed creaking. More cries. And moans. Then the sounds of Bucky getting up and going into the bathroom. Rooting through drawers and medicine cabinets. Getting back in bed. Opening a jar.

Steve lets slip a silent sigh of relief and makes a mental note to order some lube for Bucky. He's also going to have to do a search for how to wash Vaseline out of sheets, but he really doesn't care.

Bucky has finally remembered that his life and body are his own. That he's allowed to feel pleasure and joy. That he may give them to himself. That he doesn't have to wait and see what life will give him. He can reach out and take happiness where he finds it.

And then Steve hears his own name, called over and over, and if his mouth hadn't gone dry half an hour ago he would answer. As it is, his eyes go wide and it feels like a dam has burst somewhere behind his ribs, flooding his chest with eddies of warmth.

The nights in late September are a bit too chilly for skinny dipping, so they end up doing extra reading.

Tonight, Bucky puts his head in Steve's lap as he asks Steve to read to him.

If Steve's reading a novel, Bucky doesn't ask him to read it aloud, but, if it's poetry, he likes to hear it, because the way the words sound side by side is so important.

It reminds them both of when they were in high school and they'd divvy up their homework to get it done faster. In those days, Bucky would most often do their reading because Steve's breathing was unreliable at best. Steve would do their math and then, afterward, if Bucky was still reading, he'd pull out his sketchbook and draw. Most often he'd copy images out of library books. He drew Michelangelo's marbles. Sargent's portraits. Photographs of Paris and Venice. Military uniforms and historical fashion. All while Bucky filled his ears with Shakespeare, Keats, and Dante.

Bucky prefers to listen now. To let himself rest. He can focus on the warmth of Steve's leg against the back of his head where he can feel both of their heartbeats throbbing pleasantly through his scalp. He can hear Steve's belly gurgling as he digests his dinner. And he can smell the perfume of the laundry detergent clinging lightly to Steve's pajamas, overlying the richer scents of Steve's skin.

Touching Steve helps Bucky relax. It's like being anchored and guarded all at once. It takes his mind off the world beyond the walls of the house and lets him drift on Steve's voice.

Tonight, Steve is reading all of A. E. Housman's poems.

“Are these from the first world war?” Bucky asks, halfway through, and Steve opens another tab on his iPad to check the date.

“Eighteen ninety-six,” Steve murmurs, surprise audible in his voice.

“I usually like blank verse better...” Bucky says.

“Yeah, same,” Steve says, picking up the thought. “But this feels like it couldn't go any other way.”

Steve feels Bucky nodding against his thigh. He reaches his left hand down to ruffle Bucky's hair and smooth it back again.

Bucky asks to hear several of the poems a second time, and Steve obliges.

Some of the pieces have Bucky humming in pleasure at the rhythm of the words. But many of them make his breath catch in his throat while tears well up in his eyes. Beautiful boys going to war and never coming back again. Unrequited love. The soul-sickness that comes from killing. Whole lives lived in denial.

“Wilde is the sinner,” Bucky guesses, when Steve is finished.

“Gotta be,” Steve says, opening another tab to look it up. “Yeah,” Steve confirms.

“Did they toss this Housman guy in prison, too?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks that up - “No, he made it through” - and then reads bios of Housman aloud. Tom Stoppard's piece, The Lad That Loves You True, leaves both of them stunned and crying. Bucky presses Steve's hand down tight where it's resting over his heart as they wait for their eyes to clear.

“Poor bastard,” Bucky whispers. “Loved him his whole goddamn life, and got nothing. Probably not even a kiss.”

“They stayed friends,” Steve says. “That's not nothing.”

Bucky closes his eyes while a strange new war wages in his mind.

Peggy has always been there in his head, crushing his hope so sweetly he can't hold it against her. But now thoughts of Thor are in there, too. Steve's words after Thor had offered to bathe him - Well, I'm not made of stone.

Bucky has been clinging to those six syllables ever since they were uttered.

“Do you want what Moses Jackson got?” Bucky breathes. “Find a nice girl... Get married... Raise a family...”

Steve shakes his head no and Bucky can hear Steve's breathing shifting. He feels Steve's pulse speed up where the back of his head is still pressed against Steve's thigh.

“I've got you,” Steve says.

Bucky opens his eyes and stares.

“Don't I?” Steve asks.

“I know you've got about as much sense as a pumpkin, Rogers, but that's a dumb question even for you. 'Course you got me, idiot,” Bucky huffs. “Not lettin' you outta my sight.”

Steve smiles, closes his tablet, and tosses it aside. It's dark in the house without the light from the screen.

Steve lets his head sag over the edge of the couch. His left hand is still splayed over Bucky's heart and his thumb is brushing back and forth through the patch of hair there. Bucky thinks of a cat twitching its tail. And then Bucky can feel Steve's weight shifting and he wants to screamno, because Steve's going to get up and go to bed and take all the warmth in the world with him. But Steve just weaves the fingers of his right hand though Bucky's hair instead. It's still damp from Bucky's shower. Steve's hair has been dry for an hour. Half of the water in Bucky's hair has soaked into the leg of Steve's pajama bottoms. It makes the cotton smell like shampoo and like Bucky - like Steve has been marked asBucky's. Bucky likes that thought so much he doesn't know what to make of himself.

And then Steve's left hand does move, but it doesn't leave. It flows up to trace Bucky's collarbones. The skin is fine and taut, and more sensitive than Bucky has ever given it credit for. He lets out a sigh that speaks of more than relief. And Steve's hand starts drifting again until it's wrapped around Bucky's throat. Not gripping, but cupping. Protecting and caressing all at once. He worries the Adam's apple with the tip of his index finger, following its contours from every angle while Bucky's breaths grow deeper.

Bucky can feel the stubble on his jaw catching in the whorls of Steve's fingerprints. Feel strong fingers flexing in his hair, tugging pleasantly and then rubbing the stretch away. Feel Steve pinching his right earlobe lightly and then following the contours of his face. Fitting his thumb into the space below the lower lip. Close, but not close enough.

Bucky takes Steve's hand and sets it over his lips so that he can press a kiss up into Steve's palm.

And then Steve lifts Bucky's head so that he can get up off the couch and Bucky feels cold sweat starting under his arms because he just crossed the line and it was only an inch too far, but it's not a question of degree.

“Steve, I'm sorry, I thought-”

“Shove over,” Steve says, and Bucky takes a second to process that before he shifts so that he's pressed against the back of the couch.

Steve stretches out in front of him and tugs the blanket up over them.

But now Bucky's arm is trapped between them.

“Shit. Switch places with me,” Bucky says, and they scramble to swap and settle again.

They're nose to nose in the dark. Steve's arm is under Bucky's neck and Bucky can hear the steady pulse in his ear where it rests against warm flesh. Steve's leg is over his hip, pulling him close. They're both hard already, cocks pressed together between their bellies with just the thin cotton of Steve's pajamas between them.

Steve brushes their noses together and runs his hand up and down Bucky's spine in firm, slow passes, pressing Bucky tighter against his chest.

Bucky can feel every inch of his own skin when Steve leans in to press their lips together in a soft kiss. He can hear himself hum. Hear the soft sounds their mouths make when they nip and pucker and glide together. He can taste the last lingering hint of mint on Steve's tongue when he licks into Steve's mouth. He imagines his own tongue tastes the same, since they brushed their teeth together three hours ago.

They stretch their jaws wide to open up their kisses and Bucky thrusts his fingers through Steve's hair, feeling the short strands brush his palm as his hand rakes Steve's scalp. Steve's breath is coming fast, puffing out against Bucky's cheek. When Bucky sucks on Steve's tongue, rhythmically pulling it into his mouth, Steve moans and they both pump their hips. Their cocks grind together and they break their kiss to groan. Steve fists Bucky's hair to tug his head back and then leans in to suck bruises onto Bucky's bared throat.

Bucky feels like an animal in heat, arching his back and offering himself up. Wanton. Shameless. Needy. He curses and works his hips as hard as he can, seeking purchase against the hard length of Steve's cock and feeling the flesh throb against his own.

Steve licks the hollow at the base of Bucky's throat and Bucky comes all over Steve's stomach while he chants Steve's name.

Bucky's body is trying to drag him down to sleep. He's never known relief like this; like every muscle has gone slack and every cord has been cut.

Steve is still breathing hard. He finds it wonderful that he can sprint six miles without being winded, but making love to Bucky for a few minutes is enough to leave him gasping. He kisses Bucky's forehead and holds him close, watching his eyelids sag and his face go slack.

“Roll onto your back,” Bucky says, shaking himself awake.

He gives Steve's chest a gentle shove to help it in that direction, then leans over to set messy, breathless kisses on Steve's lips while his hand skims down Steve's front. His fingers trail through the wet streaks of semen that spatter Steve's t-shirt. He feels the fine blond hairs on Steve's belly where the fabric has ridden up. Feels the muscles flexing as excitement and anticipation build in Steve's body. When Bucky gets to the waistband, he unties the damp drawstrings and tugs the pants loose while Steve's breath speeds up against his cheek.

Steve's hips arch toward Bucky's fist when gun-calloused fingers curl tight around the thick length of his prick. The skin is hot and silky in Bucky's hand. Slick and sticky at the tip with how much the slit has been leaking.

“Buck,” Steve pants, as Bucky starts stroking.

Their kisses are mostly teeth and moans. Steve's whole body is straining, hungry and impatient. Bucky grips Steve's cock tighter, gliding the thin skin up and down the firm flesh of the shaft until Steve stops breathing and starts bucking.

Bucky can hear the heavy patter of semen falling on Steve's shirt.

The air smells like sex. Like come, cock, and the salty-tart musk of men's armpits.

Bucky wants it bottled and kept in a vault. Wants it branded onto the folds of his brain. He tries to burn it there, but his body still just wants to rest, and eventually it wins out.

Steve listens to Bucky's breathing as it slows with sleep. The sound is like a lullaby and soon he's slipping, too.

They wake an hour later, warm and languid.

“You bunkin' with me?” Steve asks, voice thick with sleep.

“Mmmhmm,” Bucky affirms, and they head to the kitchen for water before grabbing their phones and dragging themselves upstairs.

Steve throws his pajamas in the hamper and climbs into bed, curling up on his right side and patting the space in front of him until Bucky occupies it. They sleep with their foreheads butted up against each other and Bucky's hand held between both of Steve's.

The sense of peace they bring each other is a powerful sedative. They sleep late into the day.

Steve wakes when his phone beeps with an email notification. When he checks, he finds Hill has left half a dozen messages for him, wondering what's wrong and whether they need assistance.

Steve calls her back and hopes he's not too late to tell her to hold off.

“What's going on?” she asks, as soon as Steve's name comes up on her screen.

“Vacation,” Steve sighs.

“Short notice,” she says.

“Long overdue.”

“Him, too?”

“Him, too.”

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Never better.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“Prolactin,” Steve answers, and hangs up the phone as Bucky laughs beside him.

It's bright as they rest in Steve's room. White walls and white bedding reflect the daylight onto their skin from every angle. They can see each other clearly, and they're content to let each other look.

Steve has always loved Bucky's body. When Steve hears the word man, the image his mind supplies is always the one before him now. Steve adores the black curls of hair on Bucky's chest. They draw his eyes down his friend's breast and lead him to the lovely buttons of Bucky's nipples. They're darker than Steve's, and they match Bucky's cock. A deep rosy dun. The color of lips and other puckered places.

Bucky has always had a compact, powerful form. Narrow shoulders. A muscular chest. That big square head that makes him look like a boy. And he has features like a baby's: huge blue eyes, set wide and framed by wispy eyebrows and long lashes; a short, straight nose; full, smooth lips that rest in a pout; and a cleft in his chin that almost looks like a dimple.

Bucky's smile makes time stand still in Steve's mind. It's a paradox. Joy and sorrow all at once. Because Bucky's grin has always had an ounce of worry in it, tempering the mirth and giving it a depth that Steve could drown in. And Steve knows he's the one that put the worry there; when he sees his best friend's face, it's always a little like looking in a mirror.

Bucky stares at Steve's face, watching Steve's eyes dart back and forth from beneath the fringe of black lashes. He sees Steve's gaze sweeping over his body, lingering here and there.

Steve's body is smooth and fit and lovely. Like a sculpture of a god. Perfect. Predicable. Bucky already knows what he'll find when he looks there, so he doesn't need to.

But Steve's face is an old open book if you know how to read him, and Bucky has always been fluent.

Right now, Steve is fond, eager, and relieved.

Bucky knows the feeling.

He feared this would change something between them. Close a door. End an era.

But the only things they've lost are things they won't miss: frustration, loneliness, restraint, and heartache.

In October, Bucky opens an email from Hill. It says he and Steve are as safe as they're ever going to be and that they're free to do what they want, where they want.

Bucky comes into Steve's room and sits beside him on the bed.

“What are we gonna do?” Bucky says.

“What do you mean?”

“We gotta find a new place,” Bucky explains, and he hands Steve his laptop to show him the email.

Steve scans the screen and shakes his head.

“Buck, they're not putting us up here. I bought the house. What have they been telling you?”

“Nothing. I thought this was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s safe house.”

Steve snorts and shakes his head no.

“Shit, Steve, you've been keeping a roof over my head all this time? If I'd known, I'd have chipped in, I swear. I'll pay you back.”

“You don't have to,” Steve says, and tugs Bucky down on top of himself. “You can shine my shoes if you want,” Steve murmurs. “Maybe take out the trash.”

Bucky closes his eyes and buries his face in Steve's neck while Steve's fingers work the tension out of his back.

Steve texts Nat that night to thank her for everything she's done to keep them safe.

Winter comes and makes Bucky worry about his best friend. Habit. The season was always hell on Steve's health when he was young. He was too poor for warm clothes and too thin to retain his own heat. It left him exhausted and vulnerable to infection.

Bucky walks by the couch and sees Steve's bare feet hanging off the edge. He reaches out and lightly grips Steve's toes. They're warm and plump against his palm, though Bucky's flesh still expects them to be bony and cold.

He runs his fingertip up the instep and Steve squeaks and jerks.

Bucky goes still and mirth tightens his features, though he tries to school them into indifference.

“You're still ticklish,” Bucky notes.

“Don't you dare.”

“Not while you're expecting it, Cap, gimme a little credit.”

The Saturday after their first heavy snowfall, Steve sees an old Buick pulling into their driveway. He recognizes it as belonging to their next door neighbor, Helen Gilbert, and heads out to see if she needs help.

They both come back in the house a moment later. Bucky looks up from where he's reading on the couch. He's chronologically working his way through Jane Austen. He's on Mansfield Park, watching a cruel world try and fail to beat down a bright soul. It's his favorite so far. He sets it aside and stands up, nodding his hello.

“Just came by to thank you boys for clearing off my driveway the other day,” Helen says.

“No trouble, ma'am,” Bucky smiles.

“She brought us pumpkin pie, Buck.”

“You better have the first slice,” Bucky says. “You know I won't stop once I get started.”

Steve brews coffee and he and Helen chat about the birds they've seen. Mostly titmice and chickadees, but Steve did see a snowy owl. Bucky laughs and tells Helen that he remembers that day clearly because Steve sort of screamed.

Steve isn't quick enough: Bucky eats the entire pie out of the pan that night after dinner.

Bucky goes wide-eyed and apologizes afterward.

Steve just grins. He gets a glimpse of how good it was when he leans in to steal a kiss.

“Even the crust was incredible,” Bucky sighs.

“I'll beg her for the recipe,” Steve says.

Steve isn't kidding.

The next morning he jogs off to knock on Helen's door. She offers to give him a demonstration. It's always a pleasure to have a handsome and polite young man around. Steve asks if there's anything he can do to thank her. She tells him she dropped a knitting needle and it rolled under her couch. He picks up the edge of the sofa like it doesn't weigh a thing and retrieves the needle.

It becomes a routine. Every Saturday, Steve heads out for his cooking lesson. Helen has family recipes but no children to leave them to, and she's glad they won't be going to waste.

Today, they're going to be baking and frosting a cake.

“Chocolate or vanilla?” Helen asks.

“Chocolate, if it's all right with you. Buck loves it.”

“You spoil him.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Gonna make an honest man out of him?”

“Are we baking a wedding cake?” Steve teases.

She elbows him.

Steve comes back with the cake on a plate and a separate bowl full of frosting. He isn't allowed to frost the cake until it's cooled completely, and he isn't sure how he's going to keep Bucky from eating warm chocolate cake. Or fluffy chocolate frosting, for that matter.

He sets them down on the kitchen counter, pours himself a glass of water, and leans back against the sink, draining his glass in one long arc and sighing happily.

He's decided to stand guard over the dessert until or unless he can think of something better.

Bucky is on the couch reading. Steve can't see what. Probably Emma.

“You gonna tell me, twerp?” Bucky asks, tone casual.

“Tell you what?” Steve asks, sticking his chin out.

Now that Steve has a chin, he can't seem to resist. It makes the muscles in Bucky's face strain toward a smirk every time he sees it, and he has to rein them back in with a nip to the inside of his cheek. Steve usually leads with his jaw or his chest now, where he used keep them both curled in. Bucky thinks of thirteen year old girls standing proud with their new breasts, constantly dipping their heads to steal glances at the irresistible flesh.

“Why you've got that dopey smile on your face,” Bucky answers.

Steve wonders when Bucky looked at him. He's been staring at Bucky since he turned around and he didn't catch Bucky looking up from his book.

“Helen wants to know when I'm gonna make an honest man outta you,” Steve says, and Bucky hums and nods and keeps reading for a moment.

“Livin' in sin ain't so bad,” Bucky says, with a little shrug of his left shoulder and tilt of his head. His mouth is still pouting at his book the way it always does when he's reading, but his eyes are shiny and lifting up at the corners, giving away his hidden grin. “There's cake in sin.”

Steve huffs a laugh and turns to check said cake, holding his hand just a millimeter from the surface and still finding warmth radiating up into his skin.

“You keep incubating it like that and it's never gonna cool off,” Bucky notes.

“I'll take my chances.”

Steve doesn't hear it when Bucky gets off the couch and crosses the room. He just sees a pale arm dart past him out of the corner of his eye: Bucky stealing frosting from the bowl with his fingertip.

“Who's gonna want frosting that's had your finger in it?” Steve tuts.

“Guess I'll have to eat it all myself.”

“You're a martyr.”

“Don't you forget it.”

Bucky reaches for more frosting, but Steve catches him by the wrist and then marches him back into the living room.

“You try it again and I'll make you wash the dishes all week.”

“But that'll take me a month,” Bucky pouts, biting his lower lip and batting his eyelashes as he ducks his head. “I only got one hand.”

“Well you should've thought of that before you swiped my frosting, punk.”

“You're a mean old man, Rogers. Santa's gonna shit in your stocking.”

Steve tries to keep a straight face. He's less than half successful.

Bucky's mouth is twisting like he just bit into a lemon as he tries not to break into grins and laughter.

Steve muscles him down onto the couch and then sits on the tops of Bucky's thighs.

“You incubating me now?” Bucky laughs.

“Maybe it'll make you grow up.”

Steve manages to get the cake frosted despite Bucky's best efforts.

“You have to make this every week,” Bucky moans, halfway through his third slice.

“Every day, the way you're going through it,” Steve sighs.

Steve reads Neruda aloud that night while Bucky is curled next to him on the couch beneath the blanket.

He finishes with Naked You Are As Simple As One of Your Hands.

At the end of it, they're both quiet for several minutes.

“I've only got one hand,” Bucky says, then shakes with laughter while Steve flicks his ear and groans.

“That was one of Neruda's sonnets, punk - show some respect.”

“Dirty drawings and now dirty poetry. You're a real piece of work, Rogers.”

“Maybe I ought to just beat some culture into your bare ass with this book, Barnes. Maybe you learn better by osmosis.

“Ooo! All that alliteration. You pick that up reading smut?”

“Alliteration is a pretty big word coming from a guy who can't remember how to put on a pair of pants.”

“Your favorite sculptures never wear pants.”

“They don't wear down comforters and mustaches made of chocolate frosting either.”

Bucky wipes his mustache off on the front of Steve's t-shirt while Steve watches with one eyebrow cocked and his chin jutting out beneath pursed lips.

“Ignorance is bliss, Rogers; my ignorance, your bliss.”

“You're sleeping under the porch with the possum.”

In early spring, Steve is in the bathroom giving his hair a trim when he hears Bucky's feet on the stairs and then sees him in the doorway.

“You got time to do mine after?” Bucky asks.

“Sure.”

Steve's been cutting his own hair since he was twelve. His mother taught him how. He used to do Bucky's, too. It was an easy way to save money and a great excuse to trade affections with his best friend without anyone looking at them funny.

He finishes up his front and brushes the loose strands off his shoulders.

“An inch?” Steve asks, because that's how much Bucky usually has him take off the ends.

Bucky shakes his head and runs his fingers though his hair.

“I was thinking more along the lines of what you've got,” Bucky says.

Steve nods and sets to work.

Bucky keeps his eyes closed until Steve blows on his face to clear the clippings away.

How's that?” Steve says.

Bucky stares in the mirror. He looks like himself again. Like the man he sees in his mind whenever Steve calls his name. Short at the edges and a little longer on top. Swept to his right.

His nostrils flare and his lips waver as a few tears escape and slip down past his smile.

“Feels lighter,” Bucky says, tipping his head from side to side.

Steve squeezes Bucky's waist and pats his behind. He gathers the long strands of hair from the floor and sets them in the bushes out back for birds to take and weave into their nests.

It's only two in the afternoon, but they both shower to rinse all the itchy hair from their skin, and showering always precedes sleep, so they get back in bed. Bucky is straddling Steve's lap as they trade kisses and let their fingers flow over firm shoulders. Soon their kisses begin to wander and grow teeth. Then Bucky is keening and grinding his cock into Steve's stomach as Steve sucks on the tender flesh at the end of his left arm.

When Bucky gets close, he groans and shoves Steve flat on his back. He kneels, breathing hard and willing himself not to come all over the gorgeous body that's laid out in front of him. When he's calmer, he climbs off the bed to hunt for the lube while Steve watches him with those enormous eyes.

“I think it's still on the floor in the hall,” Steve says, and Bucky starts laughing.

There's a full length mirror at the end of the hallway. Yesterday Bucky bent over and asked Steve to fuck him in front of it so they could see everything.

Bucky comes back and slips into bed, nudging Steve's legs apart and settling between them. He bends to give lewd sucking kisses to the length of Steve's cock, flicking the frenulum with his tongue and wetly teasing the slit, tasting the salty bead of fluid that's nestled there.

Steve groans when lube flows down between his legs and into the cleft of his ass, then whimpers when Bucky's fingertips begin working it into his skin, tracing and tickling the wrinkled knot of his hole before carefully pushing inside. Just the third finger, palm up: it's the longest and it lets Bucky reach the best bits. He glides the digit in as far as it will sink and then pulls it out so that only the tip remains within. He feels Steve's hole flexing and squeezing, trying to push him out or pull him in.

Bucky crooks his finger slightly and slides it back inside. He gives a few shallow thrusts, teasing the bulge of flesh on the front wall of Steve's ass.

Steve's cock twitches and leaks onto his belly. Bucky keeps at it, petting Steve's prostate in a relentless rhythm and watching as the tension in Steve winds tighter. His cock gets thicker and redder, bobbing helplessly above his hips.

Soon, Steve is soaked in sweat and panting. His thighs are flexing and shaking.

“Buck, please, don't leave me like this,” Steve begs.

But Bucky wants to watch Steve's cock, and he can't do that if the pretty thing is in his mouth.

“You can do it, baby, you're so close. I wanna see it.”

Steve's eyes are squeezed shut tight and his head is thrown back and to the side. His whole body is straining. His teeth are bared and his lower lip is caught between them.

Bucky keeps working his third finger into Steve's clenching hole, tracing the edge of Steve's entrance with the pad of his thumb while he pets the sweet spot hidden in his sweetheart and wrings tears from big blue eyes.

Steve feels like he's being pricked with pins everywhere below his navel. Especially the soles of his feet. And it feels like Bucky's finger has somehow become a part of him, working its way right through the wall of his ass and into the core of his cock. Everything between his legs is burning. Hot, tight, and swollen. He needs to come. Needs to release all this pressure and heat with screams and bursts of semen. But he's pinned here by one wickedly patient finger.

“Buck,” Steve sobs, writhing.

Bucky hums and then picks up his pace. He thrusts faster and deeper, rubbing his thumb into Steve's taint while his knuckles bounce through Steve's hole and and the pad of his finger glides over raw nerves.

Steve's breathing starts to change and his whole body begins bracing itself. Bucky watches as Steve's balls draw up tight to the base of his cock. And then he can feel Steve's hole clenching around his finger while Steve wails.

Steve's semen spurts all the way onto his own face, thick jets that slowly fade until they're just dribbling down the head of his cock and pooling in the fur at the base.

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky breathes, watching the heaving of Steve's breast.

His eyes follow the rolling waves and shudders that radiate through the muscles of Steve's core. He feels the faint flexing of Steve's anus around his finger as the aftershocks of Steve's orgasm flutter through it.

He bends to kiss the base of Steve's cock as he slips his finger free.

Steve heaves a deep sigh and then tips his head up. His eyes are glassy and dark, but oddly alert.

“Buck,” Steve says, and spreads his legs wider as he draws up his knees.

“Christ, you're too good to be true,” Bucky sighs, and kisses Steve's thigh, then grabs the lube.

He pours it all over both their cocks and then onto Steve's asshole, which looks a little pink.

Steve sits up, slips his hands under Bucky's arms, and then lies back, holding Bucky up over himself until Bucky slides his arm under Steve's neck and rests his weight on his right elbow.

Steve reaches between them and strokes Bucky's cock with slow wringing twists of his hand. Bucky licks the semen off Steve's face and they trade kisses that begin as nips and then melt into something wilder, jaws stretching wide to admit the swipe and swirl of tongues. They're seeking and mapping something in each other's mouths while quiet moans buzz though their lips.

Then Steve sets the tip of Bucky's cock against the tender center of his entrance and Bucky lowers his hips, easing his length into the tight heat of Steve's hole.

Bucky would swear every drop of blood in his veins does a somersault at the sensation. To feel the taut walls of muscle inside Steve's ass clenching around his cock is enough to make him faint.

Steve seems to be having a similar reaction: when Bucky wiggles his hips, Steve's eyes roll back in his head.

Bucky goes still, tormenting Steve a little just to see what he'll do.

Steve brings his legs up and wraps them around Bucky's waist, pulling him in tighter and then flexing them to urge Bucky on.

“Something on your mind?” Bucky teases, but he's panting and his voice is strained.

Steve digs his fingers into Bucky's flanks and Bucky squeaks a laugh and then squirms.

“Buck, please,” Steve breathes.

“Please what?” Bucky asks, because sometimes he just can't resist. He likes to make Steve say it because he loves to hear it. Loves to have proof that what Steve wants done to him and what he wants to do to Steve are one and the same.

“Bucky,” Steve gasps, exasperated.

“Hmmm?”

“Fuck me, punk, or so help me I'll flip us over and fuck myself.”

Bucky draws a sharp breath but otherwise remains motionless, staring Steve down and calling his bluff.

“Oh, is that how it's gonna be?” Steve asks, looking up into Bucky's eyes and seeing them flash in answer.

Steve grabs Bucky's ass, pulls him in tight, and rolls them. And now he's kneeling astride Bucky's hips and Bucky is breathing hard and grinning. Steve leans down to kiss him and Bucky arches his hips in a slow rhythm, letting Steve's hole milk his cock while they nip and suck each other's lips. When Bucky is too far gone for kisses, Steve sits up and starts bouncing. His erection slaps wetly on the sweat-slick skin of Bucky's belly, bobbing to the rhythm of their hips.

He drives himself down onto the shaft of Bucky's cock over and over, feeling the ridge at the crown dragging against all the sensitive spots inside him. His nerves are burning again.

But so are Bucky's.

Steve can hear Bucky's breath going ragged. See Bucky's gaze struggling to stay focused. Bucky likes to look at Steve's face. Or his cock. His eyes try to dart up and down between them. But nature is hard to resist, and Bucky succumbs, letting his eyes squeeze shut and his head strain back. He thrusts up as Steve sinks down and then he's moaning. Steve goes still and lets Bucky fuck up into him until he's spent.

Steve's head starts to drop and his mind begins to drift until hot fingers close around his cock, giving it a long stroke. Steve nods and Bucky jerks him off, catching some of Steve's come on his tongue and then sagging back into the bed.

When they peel themselves apart, they're such a mess they have to trudge back to the shower.

Then back to bed.

They tell themselves they're just going to rest for a minute, but Steve falls asleep tucked under Bucky's arm and they don't wake up until sunrise.

“Eggs on toast?” Bucky asks in the morning.

Steve hums and nods and goes back to sleep.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> please pretend commenting is turned off and please don't repost.


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